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Lunch Veal

A veal dish with gelatin, eggs, and lemon slices set in a mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Lunch Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Remove skin and fat from the veal steak.

  2. Cover the veal with 1 quart of water and simmer slowly until reduced to 1 pint.

  3. Remove the meat when very tender and cut it into dice.

Set the mold

  1. Wet a mold in cold water.

  2. Place the sliced hard-boiled eggs and lemon slices in the mold with the veal.

  3. Add the gelatine, nutmeg, salt, and pepper to the broth, then strain it into the mold.

  4. Set aside to harden.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 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. Veal + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,580 recipes

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

  5. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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 steak
Provides the meat and the flavourful broth when simmered slowly until tender.
Gelatine
Sets the strained broth into a firm jelly that holds the meat and eggs in place.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add firm, pale slices that contrast in texture with the tender diced veal.

The step that matters

Simmer the veal slowly until tender. Gentle simmering lets collagen in the veal break down into gelatin-rich tenderness, while a hard boil toughens the meat and clouds the broth. Reducing to a pint concentrates the flavour that will set the jelly.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, egg, lemon, pepper. 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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