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Veal Stew

A slow-cooked stew of veal with onions, cloves, mace, spices, lemon juice, and white wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Veal Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Combine the onions, cloves, mace, white pepper, salt, and allspice in a pot.

  2. Add the veal and cover the pot.

  3. Simmer very slowly until the meat is tender.

Make the gravy

  1. Remove the veal and skim off the fat from the liquid.

  2. Strain the liquid and thicken the gravy as desired.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice and white wine.

  4. Pour the hot gravy over the veal, discarding any sediment.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

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

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Mace + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Breast and neck of veal
Provides the meat that becomes tender through long, slow simmering in liquid.
Onions
Add aromatic sweetness and body to the cooking liquid that becomes the gravy.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the savory gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the richness of the veal and gravy.

The step that matters

Simmer very slowly until the meat is tender. Gentle heat lets collagen in the tough cuts break down into gelatin, making the meat tender and the liquid rich. Boiling hard toughens muscle fibers and can leave the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, mace, allspice, lemon, white wine, veal):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, mace, allspice, lemon, white wine, veal. 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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