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Minced Veal

Small pieces of veal simmered in a mace‑flavored sauce with bacon rolls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Minced Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter, then add the flour, stock, mace, salt, and pepper.

  2. Simmer for about 30 minutes, then remove the mace.

Prepare the veal and bacon

  1. Cut the veal into very small pieces.

  2. Roll the bacon and cook it.

Combine and serve

  1. Add the veal and heat through without boiling.

  2. Serve the veal on a dish and arrange the bacon rolls around 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mace + vealtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,761 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Veal + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,049 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently in the sauce so it stays tender.
Flour
Thickens the stock with butter into a smooth sauce that coats the meat.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and, with flour, forms the base that thickens the stock.
Stock
Provides the liquid base of the sauce and adds savory flavor.
Bacon
Adds salty, smoky fat and browns as it cooks, contrasting with the soft veal.

The step that matters

Heat the veal through without boiling. Boiling a sauce containing cooked meat toughens the protein and can cause the flour-thickened sauce to break or turn grainy. Gentle heat keeps the veal tender and the sauce smooth.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, flour, butter, pepper. 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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