Skip to main content

To Ragout Cold Veal

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Ragout Cold Veal

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the cold veal into small round cutlets, trimming off gristles, skins, and bones.

  2. Make gravy with the veal fragments, onion, turnip, and carrot.

  3. Melt butter in a frying pan, then flour and brown the veal cutlets until light brown.

  4. Remove the cutlets, strain the gravy into the pan, and thicken it with flour mixed with butter.

  5. Once smooth, add the cutlets back and let them simmer slowly.

  6. Season with pepper, mace, catsup, and optional anchovy or mushroom powder.

  7. Skim the sauce and pour it hot over the ragout.

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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + turniptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  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

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, flour, pepper, anchovy, onion, turnip):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, flour, pepper, anchovy, onion, turnip. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipes