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Minced Veal

A dish of finely minced veal seasoned with lemon peel, nutmeg, and salt, simmered with broth and butter, served on toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Minced Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut cold veal as fine as possible without chopping it.

  2. Add a little lemon peel, nutmeg, and salt.

  3. Mix in 4-5 tablespoons of weak broth, milk, or water.

Cook and serve

  1. Simmer gently without boiling, adding butter rubbed in flour.

  2. Serve on thin, three-cornered sippets of toasted bread.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold veal
Forms the main body of the dish, so cutting it finely gives a tender, even texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the mixture a smoother, silkier mouthfeel.
Flour
Helps thicken the simmering liquid so it becomes a cohesive, spoonable mixture.

The step that matters

Simmer gently without boiling. Boiling can toughen the meat and cause the flour-thickened liquid to break or turn lumpy. A gentle simmer keeps the veal tender and the sauce smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits about as well
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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