Skip to main content
Main

Veal Fricandos

Veal Fricandos is a veal dish cooked with bacon, flour, and a browned butter gravy.

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

Why it works: Nutmeg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Veal Fricandos

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut veal into steaks, 1 inch thick and 6 inches long.

  2. Rub each steak with egg yolk and season with white pepper, nutmeg, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Lard the steaks with small pieces of bacon and dredge with flour.

Brown and braise

  1. Brown the steaks over a fire until they are a fine brown.

  2. Place the browned steaks in a stew pan with good gravy thickened with browned butter and flour.

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. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. White pepper + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 tender in gravy.
Egg yolk
Binds the seasoning to the surface of the steaks.
Bacon
Adds fat and savour as it is larded into the meat.
Flour
Dredges the steaks to help them brown and thickens the gravy.
Browned butter
Adds nutty aroma and richness to the gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the steaks over a fire. The steaks must reach a fine brown surface, since browning through the Maillard reaction builds flavour and colour that the gravy alone cannot supply.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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

You might also like

Veal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes