Skip to main content
Main

To Mince Veal

A finely minced veal dish seasoned with lemon peel, nutmeg, salt, and broth, finished with butter and flour, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Mince Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut cold veal into very fine pieces without chopping.

  2. Add a little shredded lemon peel, two grates of nutmeg, salt, and 4‑5 tablespoons of broth, milk, or water.

Cook and serve

  1. Simmer gently with the meat without boiling.

  2. Incorporate a bit of butter rubbed in flour.

  3. Arrange thin toasted bread snippets around the dish.

  4. Strew fried bread crumbs over the meat or serve in little heaps for garnish.

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

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

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

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold veal
Provides the meat that forms the body of the dish, cut fine so it stays tender.
Butter
Rubbed into flour, it adds richness and helps thicken and smooth the sauce.
Flour
Combined with butter, it thickens the liquid so the meat sits in a lightly bound sauce.
Broth or milk or water
Supplies the moisture that gently cooks the meat and forms the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer gently without boiling. Boiling toughens meat proteins and makes them contract and dry out, while gentle simmering keeps the veal tender and moist.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, nutmeg, milk, butter, flour, bread):

  1. Raisinfits about as well
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, nutmeg, milk, butter, flour, bread. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes