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Plain Veal Cutlets

A simple dish of veal cutlets fried and served with a gravy made from flour, butter, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Plain Veal Cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cutlets

  1. Trim veal cutlets into proper shape and beat them with a rolling pin until the fibers are broken.

  2. Dust the cutlets with flour to prevent gravy escape.

Fry and make the sauce

  1. Fry the cutlets in a moderate heat for 12 to 15 minutes until amber brown and cooked through.

  2. Transfer cutlets to a hot dish and pour off excess fat from the pan.

  3. Add a slice of fresh butter to the pan and melt it.

  4. Stir in 2 teaspoons of flour and cook until well-colored.

  5. Gradually add 1 cup of gravy or boiling water, then season with pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  6. Bring the sauce to a boil and pour it over the cutlets.

Serve

  1. Serve with optional forcemeat balls or rashers of ham or bacon.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Veal cutlets
Beaten to break the fibers so the meat cooks up tender rather than tough.
Flour
Dusting helps the cutlets brown and gives the gravy a surface to thicken against.
Butter
Melted into the pan to carry the flour and add richness to the sauce.
Gravy or boiling water
Liquid that, once thickened with the flour, forms the body of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. The flour must cook in the butter until well-colored so it loses its raw taste and thickens the sauce smoothly instead of leaving it pasty.

“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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