Skip to main content
Main

Boilee Veal

A veal dish simmered with water, salt, pepper, mace, and optional wine, served with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Boilee Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Boil and stew

  1. Boil the veal for three hours.

  2. Serve with celery or oyster sauce.

  3. In a pot, combine the veal, water, salt, pepper, and mace.

  4. Stew for 1.5 hours, turning once or twice.

Make the force-meat balls

  1. Make force-meat balls by mixing chopped veal, bread crumbs, sweet herbs, salt, pepper, butter, and egg.

  2. Form small balls and place them on the meat.

Brown and finish

  1. Baste with butter.

  2. Sprinkle with flour.

  3. Brown in the oven for 20 minutes.

  4. Add white wine, butter, and flour to the gravy.

  5. Boil and pour over the meat.

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. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  2. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + carrottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mace + carrottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Butter and flour 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

Veal
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender with slow, gentle cooking.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the top brown in the oven.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the meat.
Egg
Binds the force-meat balls so they hold their shape.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the gravy.

The step that matters

Stew gently and turn the meat. Low, steady heat over a long time breaks down connective tissue so the veal becomes tender. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and dry its outer layers, so turning it helps it cook evenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, pepper, butter, flour, egg, white wine, carrot):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, butter, flour, egg, white wine, carrot. 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.

More boiled veal recipes

Fillet 36Loin 25Knuckle 19Breast 15Leg 6 See all 24 →

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipes