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Stuffed Fillet of Veal with Bacon

A veal fillet stuffed with pork, herbs, and bacon, then boiled and baked with a cracker coating.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Stuffed Fillet of Veal with Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the veal

  1. Remove the bone from the veal and shape it into a round with skewers.

  2. Bind the veal securely with soft twine.

  3. Fill the cavity with a mixture of crumbs, chopped pork, thyme, parsley, pepper, coarse sea salt, nutmeg, and lemon peel.

  4. Cover the top with thin slices of bacon or salt pork, tying them in place with twine.

Cook

  1. Place in a pot with 2 cups of boiling water and cook slowly for 2 hours.

  2. Remove from the pot and place in a dripping pan.

  3. Undo the strings and twine.

Crust and bake

  1. Brush the meat all over with raw egg and coat thickly with rolled crackers.

  2. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 30 minutes, basting often with gravy from the pot.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot dish with the pork around it.

  2. Strain and thicken the gravy to 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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal fillet
Forms the main body of the roast, cooked tender by slow, moist heat.
Crumbs
Bind the force-meat filling and help keep it moist inside the roast.
Chopped pork
Adds fat and moisture to the stuffing so it stays juicy as it cooks.
Thin slices of bacon or salt pork
Lay over the top, adding fat that bastes the meat and flavors the surface.
Raw egg
Brushed on the surface so the cracker coating adheres and browns in the oven.
Rolled crackers
Form a crisp, browned crust during baking.

The step that matters

Slow cooking in the pot. Cooking the veal slowly in liquid keeps the lean meat tender and moist. Boiling it hard would toughen the proteins and dry the roast.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, meat, pork, thyme, parsley, pepper, lemon):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, meat, pork, thyme, parsley, pepper, lemon. 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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