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Minced Veal for a Dish

A stew of minced veal flavored with lemon, béchamel, and spices, served with bread and pickled sheep’s tongues.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Minced Veal for a Dish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut the veal into small pieces and place them in a stewpan.

  2. Add a small amount of grated lemon peel and béchamel sauce.

  3. Season with Cayenne pepper, lemon juice, and coarse sea salt.

Stew

  1. Stew the veal gently for 10 minutes.

  2. For a richer version, add broth, chopped shallot, nutmeg, and more lemon peel to the veal.

  3. Stew for another 10 minutes.

  4. Add a mixture of eggs and cream just before serving.

  5. Simmer for 5 minutes, ensuring it does not burn or curdle.

Serve

  1. Serve with slices of bread, either fried or plain.

  2. Serve in a deep dish topped with pickled sheep’s tongues and slices of bread around the dish.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 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
Forms the main body of the stew, providing meaty substance and texture.
Bechamel sauce
Adds creaminess and body, giving the stew a smooth, thickened texture.
Eggs
Thicken the cream mixture gently as it heats, giving the stew a silkier body.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, softening flavour and giving a smooth mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy flavours of the stew.

The step that matters

Adding the egg and cream mixture. Eggs thicken through gentle heat but curdle if they get too hot or boil. Adding them just before serving and simmering briefly, without letting the stew burn or boil hard, keeps the sauce smooth and glossy.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, lemon, sauce, pepper, nutmeg, egg, cream):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Shallotthe original
  4. Asparagusfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, lemon, sauce, pepper, nutmeg, egg, cream. 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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