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Veal Cutlets Stewed with Celery

Veal cutlets stewed in a celery-infused gravy with butter, flour, and garnished with lemon and fried forcemeat balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Veal Cutlets Stewed with Celery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Cut the cutlets from the best part of the neck, ensuring they are shaped well.

  2. Make gravy from the bones, adding the scalded celery, salt, pepper, and stewed onion.

  3. Strain the gravy, returning the celery to it, and thicken with butter and flour.

Stew and serve

  1. Pour the boiling hot gravy over the cutlets.

  2. Stew the cutlets until tender.

  3. Garnish with lemon and fried forcemeat balls.

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. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal cutlets
Provide the tender meat that is the main body of the dish.
Celery
Adds a distinct vegetal flavor and aroma to the gravy.
Butter
Enriches the gravy with fat, adding richness and smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the cutlets rather than running off.
Stewed onion
Adds savory sweetness and depth to the gravy.

The step that matters

Stew the cutlets until tender. Veal neck contains connective tissue that softens only with long, gentle moist heat. Stopping early leaves the meat firm and chewy, so it should be held at a gentle simmer until it gives easily under a fork.

Swap the onion

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

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

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