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Blanquette of Veal

A veal dish simmered in water, thickened with flour and cream, flavored with parsley and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Blanquette of Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the veal

  1. Brown the veal in the butter.

  2. Pour the water over the veal and cook for 45 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the flour and cream.

  2. Add the mixture to the saucepan along with the parsley.

  3. Cook for an additional 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Place the veal on a dish and pour the sauce over it.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  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
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during slow cooking in liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and helps brown the surface of the veal.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and cream mixture to the saucepan. Flour clumps when it meets hot liquid unless it is first blended smoothly with cream and stirred in well. Lumps in the sauce are hard to fix once they form, so the mixture should be combined fully before it goes into the pan.

“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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