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Veal Cutlets, with Tomato Sauce

Veal cutlets cooked with oysters, bread crumbs, mace, nutmeg, and tomato sauce gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Veal Cutlets, with Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Fry the veal

  1. Heat a frying pan and add boiling lard.

  2. Fry the veal cutlets until half cooked.

  3. Add oysters with their liquor, thickening with bread crumbs, mace, and nutmeg.

  4. Continue frying until the veal and oysters are fully cooked.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Make gravy with tomato sauce and stock, thicken it, and pour around the cutlets.

  2. Serve in a covered dish.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Bread + tomatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

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

  4. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Oyster + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,545 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal cutlets
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and browned when fried.
Oysters
Add a briny, savoury flavour and soft texture to the filling.
Bread crumbs
Thicken the oyster liquor into a binding mixture.
Tomato sauce
Provides acidity and body to the gravy poured over the cutlets.
Stock
Adds savoury moisture to the gravy and helps it thicken with the sauce.

The step that matters

Add oysters with their liquor, thickening with bread crumbs. Oysters are delicate and overcook quickly, becoming tough and shrunken, so they should be cooked only until just firm. The bread crumbs absorb the liquor to bind the mixture without making it stodgy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, oyster, bread, nutmeg, butter, tomato, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, oyster, bread, nutmeg, butter, tomato, sauce. 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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