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Dessert

Croustades of Veal

Veal filling with lemon, spices, mushroom, and shalot, served in pastry cases with a white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Croustades of Veal

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Mince the veal extremely fine.

  2. Add lemon rind, nutmeg, mace, salt, pepper, mushroom, and shalot to the veal.

  3. In a saucepan, combine the veal mixture with milk and stir until absorbed and dry.

  4. Keep the veal warm on a hot plate.

Make the sauce

  1. Moisten corn‑flour with a little milk.

  2. In a pot, bring white stock to a boil, then add corn‑flour and cream.

  3. Boil for 3–4 minutes.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill croustade cases with veal, place on a warm dish, and pour the white sauce over them.

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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  4. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Fillet of veal
Forms the main body of the filling, which is minced fine so it packs and holds together.
New milk
Moistens the minced veal so it absorbs liquid and becomes a dry, cohesive mass.
Johnston's corn-flour
Thickens the white stock into a smooth sauce when it is boiled.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, carrying its savoury flavour.
Good cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, softening its texture.

The step that matters

Boil the corn-flour sauce for 3–4 minutes. Starch thickens only when boiled, and it must be moistened first so it does not clump. Boiling long enough fully swells the starch granules and cooks out the raw starch taste. Stirring keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, lemon, nutmeg, pepper, mushroom, milk, corn):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, lemon, nutmeg, pepper, mushroom, milk, corn. 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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