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To Make an Excellent Ragout of Cold Veal

A ragout made from veal cutlets simmered in a sauce of butter, flour, and mushroom ketchup or wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

To Make an Excellent Ragout of Cold Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the veal

  1. Cut the veal into handsome cutlets.

  2. Heat butter or dripping in a frying pan until hot.

  3. Flour and fry the veal until light brown, then remove it from the pan.

  4. If no gravy is ready, add boiling water to the frying pan, boil for a minute, and strain into a basin.

Make the sauce

  1. In a new pan, melt 1 ounce of butter and mix in enough flour to dry it up. Stir over the fire for a few minutes, then gradually add the strained gravy.

  2. Let the mixture simmer for ten minutes, then season with pepper, salt, mace, and mushroom ketchup or wine.

Combine and serve

  1. Strain the sauce over the meat and gently stir until warmed through.

  2. If using, add sliced ready-boiled bacon to warm with the meat.

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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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 meat that is browned and then gently warmed in the sauce.
Flour
Coats the meat to brown, and thickens the butter into a roux that gives the sauce body.
Butter
Carries the frying and enriches the sauce with fat and a rounded flavour.
Mushroom ketchup or wine
Adds savoury, acidic depth to the sauce, rounding out its flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring the roux before adding the gravy. Cooking the flour in the melted butter for a few minutes cooks out its raw starchy taste and helps it thicken evenly. Adding liquid too early or without stirring can leave lumps.

Swap the mace

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

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

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