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Minced Veal

Veal mince cooked in a gravy of broth, mace, pepper, salt, lemon peel, catsup, thickened with flour and butter, served with bread points and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Minced Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Combine veal bits with broth, mace, white pepper, coarse sea salt, grated lemon peel, and catsup in a pot.

  2. Cook the mixture until nearly done.

  3. Remove some gravy from the pot.

  4. Thicken the removed gravy with flour and butter.

  5. Boil the thickened gravy with the remaining gravy.

Serve

  1. Pour the thickened gravy over the veal.

  2. Garnish with toasted bread points, parsley, and lemon slices.

  3. Add a little lemon juice to the gravy for extra flavor.

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

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

  2. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mutton + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,488 recipes

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

  5. Veal + muttontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,394 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

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 meat that is cooked tender in the seasoned broth.
Flour
Thickens the removed gravy so it clings to the veal.
Butter
Enriches the thickened gravy with fat and smooth texture.
Mutton or veal broth
Forms the liquid base of the gravy that cooks the veal.

The step that matters

Thicken the removed gravy with flour and butter. Flour must be cooked into the butter and fully boiled with the liquid so it swells and thickens smoothly. Adding it without boiling long enough can leave the gravy pasty or starchy-tasting.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, mutton, mace, lemon, flour, butter, bread):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, mutton, mace, lemon, flour, butter, 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.

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