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Breast of Veal Stewed

A veal stew simmered with stock, wine, herbs, ham bone, carrot, and pickled mushrooms.

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

Breast of Veal Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the veal

  1. Brown the veal by half-roasting it and remove as many bones as possible.

Make the stew

  1. Place the veal in a stewpan with stock, wine, lemon peel, sweet herbs, ham bone, and carrot.

  2. Simmer slowly in a 300°F (150°C) oven for about 30 minutes.

  3. Strain off the sauce and remove the herbs.

  4. Return the sauce to the veal, thickening it with flour browned in butter.

  5. Boil to eliminate the raw taste of the flour.

  6. Add pickled mushrooms with their juice and serve.

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. Wine + mushroomtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,632 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-propylphenol (allspice, anise).

  3. Lemon + carrottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,796 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 becomes tender during slow simmering in the stew.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks, giving it body.
Butter
Browns with the flour, adding a nutty aroma to the thickener.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries flavour into the meat.
Pickled mushrooms
Add a sharp, tangy note along with their juice.

The step that matters

Boil to eliminate the raw taste of the flour. Flour thickener tastes pasty and raw unless it is cooked long enough for its starch to swell fully and its raw flavour to cook off. Boiling the sauce after adding the flour prevents a floury taste in the finished stew.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Applefits about as well
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, wine, ham, carrot, flour, butter, 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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