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Stewed Veal

A simple stew of veal pieces simmered with water, butter, flour, and optional lemon peel, nutmeg, pepper, and salt.

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 ↓

Stewed Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the veal cutlet into small pieces.

  2. Season with pepper, salt, grated lemon peel, and nutmeg if desired.

Cook the stew

  1. Add enough water to nearly cover the veal and cook slowly until half done.

  2. Make a rich gravy by rolling some butter in flour and adding it to the cooking water.

  3. Stir the gravy into the veal stew.

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

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 cutlet
Provides the meat that becomes tender during slow cooking in water.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the gravy, giving it a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy when rolled with butter and added.

The step that matters

Make the gravy by rolling butter in flour. Adding flour and butter directly to hot liquid can form lumps. Rolling them together first coats the flour in fat, which helps it disperse smoothly and thicken the cooking liquid 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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