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Poitrine De Veau Au Coulis De Lentilles Ou Coulis De Pois

A veal breast stew served with a lentil or pea coulis and spinach puree.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 132 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Poitrine De Veau Au Coulis De Lentilles Ou Coulis De Pois

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Blanch the veal pieces in boiling water.

  2. Stew the veal with stock, bacon, sweet herbs, garlic, and salt until cooked.

Make the coulis

  1. In a separate pot, stew the lentils or peas in water or stock until well done.

  2. Strain the lentils or peas through a sieve.

  3. If using peas, mix in the pounded spinach to make the puree green.

Combine and serve

  1. Add the puree to the veal broth, then return the meat and bacon to the pot.

  2. Serve the dish in a tureen.

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. Lentils + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together132 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Garlic + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Garlic + lentilstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together633 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + lentilstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together210 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + spinachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Veal breast
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender as it stews slowly in liquid.
Streaked bacon
Adds fat and smoky, savoury flavour to the broth and meat.
Lentils or dry peas
Break down when well cooked and strained, thickening the coulis into a smooth puree.
Spinach
Adds green colour to the pea puree when peas are used.

The step that matters

Straining the lentils or peas. Cooked legumes must be pushed through a sieve fully softened; any remaining skins or lumps leave the coulis grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, garlic, lentils, spinach):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, garlic, lentils, spinach. 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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