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Blanquette De Veau

A veal dish with a creamy sauce of butter, flour, and egg yolks, seasoned with mace, salt, and cayenne, served with ham garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Blanquette De Veau

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Pare off the brown skin from the veal.

  2. Flatten the veal slices with a rolling pin.

  3. Put the parings into broth or stock.

Make the sauce

  1. Thicken the sauce with butter, flour, and egg yolks until it is the consistency of cream.

  2. Season the sauce with mace, coarse sea salt, and Cayenne pepper.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour lemon juice over the veal slices.

  2. Warm the veal slices for five minutes.

  3. Toast the ham slices.

  4. Roll the ham slices up tightly.

  5. Arrange the rolled ham slices around the dish as garnish.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Veal + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,264 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Mace + peppertop 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

Cold shoulder of veal
Provides the tender meat that forms the body of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the veal rather than running off.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce, giving it a creamy consistency when gently heated.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.
Broth or stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat; if the sauce gets too hot it can curdle or scramble. Keep it warm and stir steadily until it reaches the consistency of cream.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, flour, egg, pepper, lemon, ham. 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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