Skip to main content
Main

Veal Olives

Veal olives are veal strips rolled with bacon, breadcrumbs, and seasonings, fried and served with a gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Veal Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut two thin steaks from a fillet of veal and beat them.

  2. Rub the steaks with the yolk of an egg.

  3. Cut the steaks into strips 4 to 5 inches long.

  4. Lay a thin piece of fat bacon over each strip.

  5. Sprinkle the strips with bread crumbs, lemon peel, parsley, cayenne pepper, and salt.

  6. Roll each strip and secure it with a wooden skewer.

  7. Dip the rolls in beaten egg, then in bread crumbs and chopped parsley.

Fry and make the gravy

  1. Heat clarified beef dripping in a frying pan until boiling.

  2. Fry the veal olives until light brown.

  3. In a separate pot, combine gravy, lemon pickle, walnut catsup, browning, cayenne pepper, and salt.

  4. Thicken the gravy with flour and butter.

Serve

  1. Place the veal olives on a hot dish and strain the hot gravy over them.

  2. Garnish with lemon pickle, forcemeat balls, and pickled mushrooms.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Parsley + walnuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together865 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Forms the main meat wrapper that becomes tender when cooked gently and rolled.
Bacon fat
Melts during frying, adding moisture and rich flavour to the lean veal.
Egg
Binds the coating so the bread crumbs stick and form a golden crust.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned outer coating when fried in the dripping.
Gravy
Provides a savoury liquid that moistens the olives and carries the seasonings.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the veal olives evenly.

The step that matters

Fry the veal olives until light brown. The dripping must be boiling hot before the rolls go in, so the coating sears quickly and seals in juices. Frying too long or too cool can dry the veal or leave the crumbs greasy.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, egg, bread, lemon, parsley, pepper, beef):

  1. Walnutthe original
  2. Chickpeafits about as well
  3. Peasfits about as well
  4. Beansfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, egg, bread, lemon, parsley, pepper, beef. 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.

You might also like