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Mince Veal

A dish of finely chopped veal seasoned with pepper and salt, cooked in gravy or butter, served on toasted bread with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mince Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the cold veal very fine.

  2. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Add cold gravy or butter and heat very hot, stirring often to prevent oiling.

  2. Serve on slices of toasted bread and garnish with lemon.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  5. Veal + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold roast or boiled veal
Forms the main body of the dish and provides its meaty texture.
Cold gravy or butter
Adds moisture and fat so the minced veal heats through without drying out.
Toasted bread
Gives a crisp base that holds the minced veal.

The step that matters

Heat very hot while stirring often. Fat in gravy or butter can separate and pool out of the meat, so the dish looks oily. Frequent stirring keeps the fat emulsified with the meat and spreads the heat evenly.

“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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