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Baked Veal

A dish of veal cubes simmered in gravy, seasoned with salt, nutmeg, lemon rind, cayenne pepper, and topped with butter and flour before baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Baked Veal

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Parboil the veal cubes.

  2. Simmer the bones and trimmings in 1 quart of water for 2 hours to make gravy.

  3. Place the meat in a pie dish and sprinkle with salt, nutmeg, lemon rind, and cayenne pepper.

  4. Mix the butter and flour, then divide into small pieces and scatter over the meat.

Bake

  1. Strain the gravy from the bones and pour it over the meat.

  2. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) until well browned.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 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

Shoulder of veal
Provides the meat that becomes tender during slow cooking in the gravy and oven.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the surface brown in the oven.
Flour
Mixed with butter, it thickens the juices and helps form a browned coating.

The step that matters

Bake in a hot oven until well browned. Browning comes from the Maillard reaction, which needs high dry heat on the surface. Too low a temperature or too little time leaves the top pale and the flavour flat.

“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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