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Minced Veal

A dish of finely chopped veal simmered in gravy or broth with lemon, nutmeg, and spices, finished with butter and served with bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Minced Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine a few spoonfuls of gravy, broth, milk, or water with lemon peel, nutmeg, salt, and pepper in a saucepan; bring to a boil.

  2. Shake a little flour into the minced veal and add it to the saucepan; heat until hot but do not boil.

  3. Just before serving, stir in a bit of butter rolled in flour.

Serve

  1. Place thin slices of bread in a dish and garnish with lemon.

Gravy

  1. For gravy, boil leftover bones gently in a little water for about an hour.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold veal
Is the meat that gets gently reheated in the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the minced veal.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth finish to the sauce.

The step that matters

Heat until hot but do not boil. Boiling the minced veal once it is in the sauce can toughen the meat and make the sauce grainy or separate. Gentle heat keeps the meat tender and the sauce smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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