Skip to main content
Main

Plain Veal Cutlets

A simple veal cutlet dish cooked in butter and finished with a light gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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.

  2. Beat the cutlets with a rolling pin until the fibers are broken.

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

Fry 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.

  3. Pour off the fat from the pan.

  4. Add a slice of fresh butter to the pan and melt the butter.

  5. Stir in the dessertspoon of flour and cook until well-colored.

  6. Gradually add the cup of gravy or boiling water.

  7. Season with pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  8. Bring the sauce to a boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the cutlets.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (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 cutlets
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender when its fibers are broken by beating.
Flour
Dusted on the cutlets to help hold the gravy, and stirred into the butter to thicken the sauce.
Butter
Fat for frying the cutlets and making the base of the sauce, adding richness and browning.
Gravy or boiling water
Liquid that, combined with the cooked flour, forms the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Cooking the flour in the fat until well-colored removes its raw taste and lets it thicken the liquid smoothly when added. Adding liquid too quickly can cause lumps.

“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.

More veal cutlets recipes

Breaded 34Fried 28Broiled 19Cracker-Crusted 8in Cream Sauce 6with Potatoes 6 See all 232 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipes