Skip to main content
Main

Minced Veal

Minced veal seasoned with salt and pepper, cooked hot, served on toasted bread with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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

  1. Chop the cold veal very fine.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  3. If available, add cold gravy; otherwise, use butter and a little water.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat the mixture very hot, stirring often to prevent oiling.

  2. Serve on slices of toasted bread and garnish with lemon.

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

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

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

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 heated and served as the main component of the dish.
Gravy or butter
Adds fat and moisture so the minced meat stays moist rather than drying out as it heats.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture very hot, stirring often. Stirring keeps the mixture from separating and releasing its fat, which would leave it greasy and oily instead of cohesive. Heating it very hot cooks the meat through quickly while the fat stays emulsified with the meat.

“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.

You might also like