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Minced Veal

A savory dish of finely minced veal cooked with lemon, nutmeg, and sea salt, finished with butter, flour, toasted bread, and bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Minced Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the cold joint of veal into very small pieces.

  2. Shred the lemon peel finely and grate the nutmeg.

Make the minced veal

  1. In a pot, combine the veal, lemon peel, nutmeg, and coarse sea salt.

  2. Add ¾ cup of white stock or milk and simmer slowly without boiling.

  3. When nearly done, mix in butter rubbed into flour.

Dress and serve

  1. Once dressed, arrange diamonds of toasted bread around the dish, each topped with a thin slice of lemon.

  2. Lightly strew fried bread crumbs over the veal and garnish with thin rolls of boiled bacon.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the main body of the dish, becoming tender when simmered gently in liquid.
Butter
Rubbed into flour and stirred in, it adds richness and helps thicken and smooth the sauce.
Flour
Combined with butter and stirred in near the end, it thickens the liquid and gives body.
White stock or milk
Provides the cooking liquid that keeps the veal moist during slow simmering.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly without boiling. Boiling toughens meat proteins and can make the veal dry and stringy, so a gentle simmer keeps it tender and moist.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, nutmeg, milk, butter, flour, bread):

  1. Raisinfits about as well
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, nutmeg, milk, butter, flour, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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