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A Good Way to Dress a Midcalf

A dish of a calf's heart stuffed with meat, liver, bacon, and seasoned with gravy, lemon pickle, ketchup, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,039 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the heart

  1. Stuff the calf's heart with good forced meat.

  2. Place the stuffed heart in an earthen dish with a little water, cover with butter, and sprinkle with flour.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil half the liver and all the lights for half an hour, then chop them small.

  2. In a pan, combine the chopped liver, gravy, lemon pickle, ketchup, lemon juice, pepper, and salt.

  3. Thicken the mixture with butter rolled in flour.

Serve

  1. Pour minced meat into a serving dish, place the fried liver and bacon on top, and set the heart in the center.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,039 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together122,858 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Meat + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together7,587 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Butter + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together41,197 recipes

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

  5. Flour + ketchuptop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and flour share little aroma chemistry, yet 122,858 recipes mention both: they likely 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

Calf's heart
Forms the main body of the dish and is the piece that gets stuffed and set in the center.
Butter
Enriches the surface and thickens the sauce, adding richness and smooth body.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when rolled with butter, giving it body without lumps.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, carrying the other flavours.
Calf's liver
Provides the savoury, meaty flavour in the sauce and as the fried topping.
Bacon
Adds salty, smoky fat to the topping, enhancing browning and flavour.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with butter rolled in flour. Adding flour-and-butter paste directly to hot liquid can clump; the flour must be evenly distributed so starch hydrates and the sauce thickens smoothly.

“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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