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Currie of Veal

A veal dish simmered in a curry-flavored gravy with onions, lemon, and chili.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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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 ↓

Currie of Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Cut a part of a neck of veal into cutlets.

  2. Make a gravy with the trimmings; season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and 1 onion.

  3. Strain and thicken the gravy with flour and butter, then add curry powder.

Cook and finish

  1. Fry the cutlets with minced onion in butter until light brown.

  2. Stew the cutlets in the prepared gravy until tender.

  3. Before serving, add the juice of ½ lemon and a little chili pepper.

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. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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 neck cutlets
Main protein that becomes tender through slow stewing in the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the cutlets rather than running thin.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the onion and cutlets brown during frying.
Curry powder
Provides the spiced, aromatic flavour that defines the dish.
Onion
Builds sweetness and savoury depth in both the gravy and the fried cutlets.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, spiced gravy.

The step that matters

Frying the cutlets until light brown. Browning the meat in butter creates flavour through the Maillard reaction. Stopping at light brown keeps the surface flavourful without drying the meat before it stews.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, flour, butter, lemon. 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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