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Disguised Leg of Veal and Bacon

A veal leg cooked with bacon, seasoned with sage and pepper, served with a green sauce of sorrel, butter, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Disguised Leg of Veal and Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Lard the leg of veal with slips of bacon and lemon peel.

  2. Boil the veal with a piece of bacon until cooked.

  3. Remove the veal and slice the bacon.

  4. Mix dried sage and pepper and rub the mixture over the bacon.

  5. Place the veal in a dish and arrange the bacon around it.

  6. Garnish with fried parsley.

Make the green sauce

  1. Pound sorrel in a mortar.

  2. Squeeze out the sorrel juice.

  3. Mix the sorrel juice with melted butter, sugar, and lemon juice.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Sage + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,445 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + sagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + sorreltop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal leg
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked tender by boiling.
Bacon
Adds savoury fat and flavour, both larded into the meat and served alongside.
Sorrel
Provides the sharp, leafy flavour and green colour of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sorrel and balances the butter.

Swap the sorrel

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

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, lemon, sage, pepper, parsley, sauce, butter. 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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