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Cutlets and Celery

Veal cutlets stewed with celery, served in a thickened gravy and garnished with lemon and fried forcemeat balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Cutlets and Celery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the meat from the bones of the veal cutlets, shaping them well.

  2. Place the bones and trimmings in a stewpan with the celery, salt, pepper, and stewed onion.

  3. Lay the cutlets on top and stew until tender.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Remove the cutlets, strain the gravy, and thicken it with flour and butter.

  2. Add the best pieces of celery to the gravy, garnish with lemon slices and fried forcemeat balls.

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. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal cutlets
Provide the tender meat that is the main part of the dish, cooked slowly until soft.
Celery
Adds a fresh, aromatic flavour to the stewed gravy and is served as a vegetable with the meat.
Flour
Thickens the strained gravy so it coats the meat and celery.
Butter
Enriches the gravy and, combined with flour, gives it a smooth, thick body.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and veal.

The step that matters

Stew the cutlets until tender. Veal from the neck is collagen-rich and needs slow, gentle moist heat to break down into tender meat. Rushing or boiling hard can leave it tough and stringy, so keep the stew at a low, steady simmer.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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