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Fricandeau De Veau

A veal fricandeau cooked slowly with carrot, onion, celery, herbs, and stock, finished with a glaze and served over spinach or sorrel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Fricandeau De Veau

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and braise

  1. Trim the veal into an oval shape and lard it with bacon.

  2. Place it in a stewpan on a bed of chopped carrot, onion, and celery.

  3. Add the herbs tied together and enough stock to half cover the veal.

  4. Cover with buttered paper and stew slowly for about 1.5 hours, basting every 10 minutes.

Glaze and serve

  1. Transfer the veal to a baking sheet and place in the oven for 5 minutes to glaze the bacon.

  2. Strain the stock, remove grease, and boil down to half-glaze.

  3. Glaze the veal nicely and serve on a bed of spinach or sorrel, pouring the half-glaze around.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  3. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Veal + carrottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Veal + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,841 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

Cushion of veal
Lean, dense meat that becomes tender and sliceable through slow, moist stewing.
Larding bacon
Adds fat strips through the lean veal, keeping it moist and flavourful as it cooks.
Stock
Provides liquid for gentle stewing and, reduced, forms the savoury half-glaze.
Carrot, onion, and celery
Aromatic base that flavours the braising liquid and the reduced half-glaze.

The step that matters

Stewing slowly with buttered paper. Gentle, covered simmering keeps the lean veal moist and tender. Boiling hard would toughen the meat and reduce the stock too quickly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, carrot, celery):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, carrot, celery. 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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