Skip to main content
Main

Veal Fillets

Veal fillets coated in beaten egg and bread crumbs, fried and served with a bacon‑flavored gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Veal Fillets

8 fillets
Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a stew-pan, combine boiling water, pepper, coarse sea salt, herbs, and sliced onion.

  2. Cut veal into 8 fillets, season, dip in beaten egg, then coat with bread crumbs.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry the fillets in boiling fat until rich brown.

  2. Fry the bacon until crisp and roll into neat shapes.

  3. Thicken the gravy with butter and flour, add browning and lemon juice, then boil.

  4. Pour the gravy around the veal, garnish with parsley and 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Butter and flour 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 fillets
Form the main protein, which browns on the outside while staying tender inside.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that protects the veal and adds browning.
Beaten egg
Acts as a binder so the bread crumbs stick to the veal fillets.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with butter, giving it body.
Bacon
Adds salty, smoky fat and flavour to the dish.

The step that matters

Fry the fillets in boiling fat until rich brown. The fat must be hot enough to brown the breadcrumb coating quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs grease and turns soggy instead of crisp.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, veal, egg, bread, butter, flour, 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes