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Veal a LA Bourgeoise

Veal à la Bourgeoise is a veal dish braised with bacon, spices, flour, gravy, and finished with an egg yolk sauce and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Veal a LA Bourgeoise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Lard the veal pieces with bacon and season with pepper, salt, mace, cloves, nutmeg, and parsley.

  2. Layer bacon slices in a stewpan and place the veal on top.

Braise

  1. Cover and cook over medium heat for 8-10 minutes.

  2. Brown the veal on both sides, sprinkle with flour, and add the gravy.

  3. Cover and simmer until cooked through.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the bacon, skim off the fat, and beat the egg yolks with some gravy to make a sauce.

  2. Pour the sauce over the meat and garnish with lemon.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  4. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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, becoming tender as it cooks slowly in liquid.
Bacon
Adds savory fat and flavor that seasons the veal as it renders during cooking.
Flour
Browns with the meat and thickens the gravy into a richer sauce.
Gravy
Provides the cooking liquid that moistens the veal and forms the base of the sauce.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce, giving it a smooth, velvety texture.

The step that matters

Beating the egg yolks into the gravy. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated but can scramble if they meet hot liquid too quickly. Beat them with some warm gravy first so they warm gradually and stay smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, pepper, clove, nutmeg, parsley, flour, egg):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, clove, nutmeg, parsley, flour, egg. 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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