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Sauce for Hashed or Minced Veal

A savory sauce made from veal bones, flour, broth, onion, lemon, mace, and butter, served with toasted bread and ham or bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sauce for Hashed or Minced Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Dredge the veal bones with flour and place them in a stew-pan.

  2. Add broth or water, onion, lemon peel, salt, and mace.

  3. Rub butter into flour and stir into the mixture.

  4. Bring to a gentle boil and simmer for about 30 minutes.

  5. Strain the sauce and warm it with the veal by the fire.

Finish and serve

  1. Squeeze in lemon juice and serve with toasted bread sippets and garnish with ham or bacon.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Bread + hamtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 bones
Give body and savory flavor to the broth as they simmer.
Flour
Thickens the sauce, giving it body and a smooth texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, smoothing the flour into the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Simmering the flour-thickened sauce. Flour thickens only when heated enough to swell its starch, but a hard boil can break the sauce and scorch the bottom of the pan. A gentle boil keeps the sauce smooth and evenly thickened.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, flour, onion, lemon, butter, bread, ham):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, flour, onion, lemon, butter, bread, ham. 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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