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Jugged Veal

Veal stewed in a jug with mace, pepper, salt, nutmeg, herbs, lemon peel, butter, flour, and lemon juice.

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 ↓

Jugged Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut slices of veal and place them in an earthen jug.

  2. Add mace, pepper, salt, nutmeg, sweet herbs, and lemon peel.

  3. Cover the jug tightly to keep the steam in.

Cook

  1. Set the jug in a pot of boiling water and cook for about 3 hours.

  2. Half an hour before it's done, add butter rolled in flour and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Turn the contents out of the jug into a dish, remove herbs and lemon peel, and garnish with lemon before serving.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Slices of veal
Main protein that becomes tender and moist during long, gentle steaming in the jug.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the finished sauce a smoother, rounder mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid when rolled with butter, giving the sauce body.
Lemon juice or lemon pickle
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the rich meat and butter.

The step that matters

Covering the jug tightly. A tight seal keeps steam inside, so the veal cooks in its own moisture and stays juicy instead of drying out. Gentle water-bath heat keeps the meat tender.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

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