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Plain Veal Cutlets

Veal cutlets coated in flour, fried, and served with a butter‑flour gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 veal

  1. Trim the veal into proper shape and pound it with a rolling pin until the fibers are broken.

  2. Coat the cutlets well with flour to prevent gravy from escaping.

Fry the cutlets

  1. Fry the cutlets in a pan over medium heat for 12 to 15 minutes until they are amber brown and cooked through.

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

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Add fresh butter to the pan and melt it, then stir in the flour until well-colored.

  2. Gradually pour in the gravy or boiling water, adding salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  3. Bring the sauce to a boil and pour it over the cutlets before serving.

  4. Garnish with forcemeat balls or bacon if desired.

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
Pounding breaks up the fibers so the cutlets stay tender when fried.
Flour
Coating the cutlets helps hold the gravy on and browns the surface; flour also thickens the sauce.
Butter
Fat for frying and browning the flour, adding richness and flavor to the sauce.
Gravy or boiling water
Liquid that, once thickened, forms the sauce that moistens the cutlets.
Lemon juice or pickle
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, buttery sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the cutlets to amber brown. Browning comes from the Maillard reaction, which needs a dry, hot surface. Overcrowding or low heat steams the veal, leaving it pale and less flavorful.

“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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