Skip to main content
Main

To Mince Veal

A veal mince soup with beef gravy, caviar, toasted bread, and pickled cucumbers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Hazelnut and cucumber share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Mince Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shred the undercooked veal as finely as possible.

  2. Dissolve the caviar in the beef gravy.

Make the soup

  1. Add the minced veal to the gravy and let it boil for about one minute.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a soup dish over the toasted snippets.

  2. Garnish with sliced pickled cucumbers.

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. Hazelnut + cucumbertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together12 recipes

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

  2. Veal + beeftop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Caviar + cucumbertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together31 recipes

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

  4. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Caviar + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together65 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the main meaty body and substance of the soup.
Beef gravy
Forms the savoury liquid base that carries the flavour of the dish.
Caviar
Adds a concentrated salty, savoury note in a small amount.
Toasted bread
Soaks up the broth and gives a contrasting crisp-soft texture.
Pickled cucumbers
Adds acidity that brightens the rich meat and gravy.

The step that matters

Boiling the minced veal. The veal is only partly cooked, so it needs enough heat to finish. Boiling too long toughens meat proteins and dries the mince, while too short leaves it underdone. Watch the time closely.

Swap the hazelnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, beef, caviar, bread, cucumber):

  1. Peasfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Walnutfits better
  4. Hazelnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, beef, caviar, bread, cucumber. 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

Beef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipes