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Stewed Veal

A veal breast stuffed, rolled, and simmered in water with lemon peel, mace, pepper, salt, and arrowroot thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Stewed Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Bone the breast of veal and spread it with veal stuffing. Roll it up tightly and tie it.

Cook

  1. Place it in a pot with 2 quarts of water, lemon peel, mace, pepper, and salt. Simmer gently for 4 hours.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Strain the liquid and remove the fat. Mix in 1 tablespoon of arrowroot. Dish the meat and pour the gravy over 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. Lemon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + arrowroottop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together329 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Breast of veal
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during long, gentle simmering.
Arrowroot
Thickens the strained cooking liquid into a smooth gravy.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 4 hours. Gentle heat keeps the liquid below a hard boil, so the connective tissue in the veal breaks down slowly without the meat toughening or the broth turning cloudy.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

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