Skip to main content
Main

Minced Veal

A minced veal dish simmered with a spiced gravy, finished with lemon, cream, and butter‑flour mixture, served over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Minced Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Remove all meat from the bones of the veal and mince it finely.

  2. Boil the brown outside, gristles, and broken bones in water with salt, pepper, and mace to make a gravy.

  3. Strain the gravy.

Combine and heat

  1. Combine the strained gravy with the minced meat in a stewpan.

  2. Add grated lemon peel, lemon juice, cream, and the butter blended with flour to the meat mixture.

  3. Heat the mixture until hot throughout.

Serve

  1. Serve the hot mixture on a dish lined with toast.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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
Provides the minced meat that forms the body of the dish, with gristle and bones adding body to the gravy.
Butter blended with flour
Thickens the mixture as the flour starches gelatinise in the hot liquid, and the butter adds richness.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the texture of the minced meat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich meat.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture until hot throughout. The flour in the butter needs to be heated fully to thicken the mixture smoothly without lumps or a raw floury taste. Heating unevenly can leave cold pockets and uneven texture, and cream can curdle if it boils too hard.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, pepper, lemon, cream, butter, flour):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, lemon, cream, butter, flour. 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.

More minced veal recipes

and Oysters 12and Macaroni 3Stew 3Moulded 3 See all 57 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes