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Veal a-LA-Bourgeoise

Veal à la Bourgeoise is a braised veal dish with bacon, spices, and a thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Veal a-LA-Bourgeoise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Lard the veal slices with bacon and season with pepper, salt, mace, cloves, nutmeg, and parsley.

  2. Place slices of fat bacon in a stewpan and lay the veal on top.

Cook the veal

  1. Cover the pan and heat over medium for 8-10 minutes.

  2. Brown the veal on both sides over a brisk fire, then sprinkle flour over it.

  3. Pour in the broth or gravy, cover, and let it stew gently until cooked through.

  4. Remove the bacon slices and skim off the fat.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the egg yolks with some of the gravy, then mix everything until smooth and thick.

  2. Place the meat in a dish, pour the sauce over it, and garnish with lemon.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 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
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing in broth.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the pan and to the larded veal.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light gravy as it stews with the veal.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the finished sauce to a smooth, creamy texture.
Broth or gravy
Provides the liquid that stews the veal and forms the base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg yolks into the sauce. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated, but if they get too hot they scramble and turn grainy. Tempering them with some warm gravy first, then mixing gently, keeps the sauce smooth and thick.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, clove, nutmeg, parsley, egg, 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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