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To Mince Veal

A minced veal dish simmered with lemon peel, nutmeg, and broth, served on toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,019 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

To Mince Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut cold veal into very small pieces without chopping.

Make the mincemeat

  1. Add a little lemon peel, nutmeg, salt, and broth, milk, or water.

  2. Simmer gently with the meat without boiling.

  3. Incorporate a bit of butter rubbed into flour.

Serve

  1. Arrange sippets of thin toasted bread around the dish.

  2. Optionally, sprinkle fried bread crumbs over the dish.

  3. For variation, stew small mushrooms in butter, mince them, and add to the veal with cream, pepper, and salt.

  4. Simmer for 3-4 minutes and serve on thin sippets of bread.

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. Nutmeg + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Flour + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold veal
Forms the main body of the mincemeat, providing the meaty texture.
Butter
Rubbed into flour to add richness and fat that carries flavour through the dish.
Flour
Combined with butter to thicken the mixture slightly and give body.
Lemon peel (shredded)
Adds bright aromatic oils that lift the rich meat flavour.

The step that matters

Simmer gently with the meat without boiling. Boiling toughens meat proteins and can make the veal dry and stringy, while gentle simmering keeps it tender and moist.

Swap the shallot

The recipe marks shallot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, lemon, nutmeg, milk, butter, flour, bread):

  1. Shallotthe original
  2. Arrowrootfits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Asparagusfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, lemon, nutmeg, milk, butter, flour, bread. 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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