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Hashed or Minced Veal

A veal dish cooked with broth, lemon peel, milk or cream, thickened with butter and flour, and baked with breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

Hashed or Minced Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut the veal into slices.

  2. Mince the veal as fine as possible, do not chop it.

Make the mixture

  1. In a stew‑pan, combine the minced veal with broth, lemon peel, and milk or cream.

  2. Thicken the mixture with butter and flour, and season with salt, lemon pickle, or curry powder.

  3. If using eggs, beat the yolks with a little milk.

Bake and brown

  1. Line a dish with lightly toasted bread.

  2. Pour the veal mixture into the dish, sprinkle with breadcrumbs and butter.

  3. Brown in a Dutch oven or cheese toaster.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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
Forms the main body of the dish, giving it its meaty texture once minced.
Butter
Enriches the mixture and, with flour, thickens it and helps the top brown.
Flour
Thickens the broth and milk into a smooth, spoonable mixture.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and help bind the mixture when used in place of cream.
Milk or cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the minced veal and rounding the flavour.
Lemon peel
Adds bright aromatic citrus flavour that cuts through the richness of the veal.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with butter and flour. Flour must be cooked with the butter and liquid so starch swells and thickens smoothly; otherwise the mixture can stay thin or turn lumpy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, milk, butter, flour, egg, cream, 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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