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Veal for Lunch

A baked layered dish of veal, ham, and hard‑boiled eggs bound with a flour‑water paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Veal for Lunch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bowl

  1. Butter a good-sized bowl and line it with thin slices of hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Layer thin slices of veal in the bowl, seasoning with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Add a layer of ham, omitting the salt, then another layer of veal, alternating until the bowl is filled.

Seal and cook

  1. Make a stiff paste of flour and water, then cover the contents of the bowl with it.

  2. Tie a double cotton cloth over the paste.

  3. Place the bowl in a saucepan with water up to the rim and boil for three hours.

  4. Remove from heat, take off the cloth and paste.

Rest and serve

  1. Let it stand overnight.

  2. The next day, turn it out and serve in very thin slices.

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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Veal + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,264 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Egg + hamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,526 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Veal + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,049 recipes

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Eggs
Hard-boiled slices form a decorative lining that shows as a pattern when sliced.
Veal
Forms the main meat layers, becoming tender during the long, gentle simmer.
Ham
Adds salty, savoury flavour between the veal layers.
Flour
Makes a stiff paste that seals the bowl so the contents cook in their own moisture.

The step that matters

Keeping the water at the rim for three hours. The bowl must stay submerged to the rim in gently boiling water for the full three hours. If the water level drops, the contents cook unevenly and may dry out, and a vigorous boil can loosen the paste seal.

“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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