Skip to main content
Main

Minced Veal for a Dish

A minced veal dish simmered with lemon peel, béchamel sauce, spices, eggs, and cream, served with pickled sheep's tongues and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Minced Veal for a Dish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the veal

  1. Cut the dressed veal into small pieces and place them in a stewpan.

  2. Add a small quantity of grated lemon peel and béchamel sauce.

  3. Season with Cayenne pepper, lemon juice, and coarse sea salt.

  4. Stew the veal gently for ten minutes.

  5. Add a mixture of two eggs and cream.

  6. Simmer for five minutes, being careful not to burn or curdle.

Serve

  1. Serve in a deep dish topped with two pickled sheep's tongues and slices of bread around it.

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. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Dressed veal
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during gentle stewing.
Bechamel sauce
Adds a creamy, smooth body that carries the flavour of the dish.
2 eggs
Thicken the mixture as they set with gentle heat, giving a custard-like texture.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, softening the texture of the finished dish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances its fat.

The step that matters

Simmer the egg and cream mixture gently. Eggs thicken by gentle heat but curdle and turn grainy if they get too hot or boil. Keeping the heat low and stirring preserves a smooth, creamy texture.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Shallotthe original
  4. Asparagusfits about as well

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

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes