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Veal Hash

A savory dish of finely chopped veal mixed with bread crumbs and simmered in a gravy of flour, water, salt, pepper, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Veal Hash

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Mix the flour with cold water until smooth.

  2. Stir the mixture into the boiling water.

  3. Add salt, pepper, and butter; keep hot.

Combine and serve

  1. Chop the cold veal very fine and mix with the stale bread crumbs.

  2. Pour the gravy over the veal mixture in a basin.

  3. Heat for about 10 minutes and serve.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Veal + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,056 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-3-hexenol (green, grassy).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with the boiling water.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the gravy, giving it smoothness.
Stale bread crumbs
Absorb the gravy and help bind the chopped veal together.
Cold veal
Provides the meat base that the hash is built around.

The step that matters

Mix the flour with cold water until smooth. Flour added directly to hot liquid forms lumps because its starch clumps before it can disperse. Blending it with cold water first lets the starch separate evenly, so the gravy thickens smoothly when the boiling water is added.

“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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