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Minced Veal

A minced veal dish simmered in a sauce of veal stock, butter, flour, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Minced Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Trim the skin and fat from the veal and cut it into small squares.

  2. Mix the veal with mace and lemon rind, and dredge with flour.

Make the stock

  1. Combine veal trimmings, stock, lemon rind, parsley, and thyme in a saucepan; cover and stew gently for 1 hour.

  2. Let the mixture cool and remove the fat.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Melt butter in a stewpan, mix with flour, add stock and milk, and stir until boiling.

  2. Season the sauce with salt and pepper, add cream if desired, then stir in the minced veal and heat through.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 tender meat that forms the body of the dish.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and adds richness to its flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce with the butter as a roux.
Veal stock
Supplies the liquid and savoury flavour for the stew and sauce.
Milk
Adds creaminess and body to the white sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the sauce until boiling. Flour thickens the liquid only when it reaches a boil and is stirred, so stopping early leaves the sauce thin and floury-tasting.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, lemon, flour, parsley, thyme, butter, milk):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, lemon, flour, parsley, thyme, butter, milk. 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.

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