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Plain Veal Cutlets

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 cutlets

  1. Trim the veal cutlets into proper shape.

  2. Beat the cutlets with a rolling pin until the fibers are broken.

  3. Dust the cutlets with flour to prevent gravy from escaping.

Fry and make the gravy

  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.

  3. Pour off the fat from the pan.

  4. Add butter to the pan and melt it.

  5. Stir in flour until well-colored.

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

  7. Bring the sauce to a boil.

  8. Add mushroom powder if desired.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the cutlets.

  2. Serve with forcemeat balls or rashers of ham/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. 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 cutlets
Provide the main meat, which cooks through and browns in the pan.
Flour
Forms a coating on the cutlets and thickens the sauce as it browns in the butter.
Butter
Adds fat for frying the roux and gives the sauce a rich flavour.
Gravy or boiling water
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that is thickened and brought to a boil.
Lemon juice or pickle
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in flour until well-colored. Cooking the flour in the butter until it browns builds flavour and colour, and it must be stirred so it does not scorch. Once the liquid goes in, it thickens the sauce evenly.

“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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