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Plain Veal Cutlets

Veal cutlets fried and served with a gravy made from butter, flour, and liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Plain Veal Cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Trim the veal cutlets into proper shape and beat them with a rolling pin until the fibers are broken.

  2. Dust the cutlets with flour to prevent gravy from escaping.

Cook and make the sauce

  1. Fry the cutlets in a pan over medium heat for 12 to 15 minutes until they are amber brown and cooked through.

  2. Transfer the cutlets to a hot dish and pour off the fat from the pan.

  3. Add butter to the pan and melt it, then stir in flour until well-colored.

  4. Gradually pour in the gravy or boiling water, adding pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  5. Bring the sauce to a boil and pour it over the cutlets before serving.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

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

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

What each ingredient does

Veal cutlets
Beating breaks the fibers so the cutlets stay tender and cook evenly.
Flour
Dusting forms a coating that helps hold the gravy on the cutlets and lightly browns the surface.
Butter
Melted in the pan, it carries the flour that thickens and flavors the sauce.
Gravy or boiling water
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, thickened by the butter and flour roux.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in the butter. Cooking the butter and flour together until well-colored develops a deeper flavor and color in the sauce, and stirring keeps it from scorching or clumping as the liquid is added.

“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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