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Breast of Veal in Hodge-Podge

A veal stew with peas, lettuce, mace, pepper, sweet herbs, and onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Breast of Veal in Hodge-Podge

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Fry the pieces of veal in heated butter in a stewpan until light brown.

Stew

  1. Fill the stewpan with boiling water and stir.

  2. Add the peas, lettuce, mace, pepper, sweet herbs, onion, and salt.

  3. Cover and stew for 1 hour or until cooked to your liking.

  4. Remove the onion, sweet herbs, and spices.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a serving dish.

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 + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Lettuce + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together486 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Lettuce + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the main meat, which browns in butter and becomes tender during stewing.
Butter
Adds fat for frying the veal, building browned flavour and a rich mouthfeel.
Green peas
Add sweetness and soft texture to the stew.
Lettuce
Softens as it stews, adding body and a mild, vegetal flavour to the liquid.

The step that matters

Browning the veal. Frying the veal until light brown in hot butter creates browned flavour through the Maillard reaction. Crowding the pan or not heating the butter enough makes the meat steam instead, leaving the stew flatter in taste.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, peas, lettuce, pepper, onion, clove):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, peas, lettuce, pepper, onion, clove. 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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