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Veal in Tomato Juice, American

Veal in tomato juice with bacon and watercress, simmered and served with a quick sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 579 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Veal in Tomato Juice, American

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the veal

  1. Melt a bit of butter in a pan.

  2. Add the veal and turn it every minute for 10 minutes until browned.

  3. Pour off the fat.

  4. Wipe out the pan.

Make the sauce and cook the veal

  1. Add the tomato juice with a little salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  2. Place the veal in the pan.

  3. Simmer for 20 minutes.

  4. Transfer the veal to a hot dish.

  5. Boil the sauce quickly for 1 minute with a little thickening.

  6. Pour the sauce over the veal.

Prepare the bacon and serve

  1. Season small pieces of bacon with pepper and chopped herbs.

  2. Roll the seasoned bacon pieces up.

  3. Broil the rolled bacon until crisp.

  4. Arrange the bacon around the dish with watercress salad in between.

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 + watercresstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Its protein sets firmly when browned and simmered, giving the dish its main body and texture.
Tomato juice
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding moisture and a tangy acidity to the veal.
Bacon
Its fat crisps under the broiler, adding savoury flavour and contrasting texture to the dish.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the veal and gives the pan a rich, nutty flavour.

The step that matters

Browning the veal. Turning the veal regularly over the full 10 minutes lets its surface brown evenly through the Maillard reaction, which builds flavour. Crowding or insufficient heat would steam the meat grey instead.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

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