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Plain Veal Cutlets

Veal cutlets fried and served with a butter‑flour gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Plain Veal Cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim the veal cutlets into proper shape.

  2. Beat the cutlets with a rolling pin until the fibers are broken.

  3. Flour the cutlets well to prevent the escape of the gravy.

Cook the cutlets

  1. Fry the cutlets in a pan over medium heat for 12 to 15 minutes until amber brown and cooked through.

  2. Transfer the cutlets to a hot dish.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Pour off the fat from the pan and add the butter.

  2. Once melted, stir in the flour and cook until well-colored.

  3. Gradually add the gravy or boiling water, then season with pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  4. Bring the sauce to a boil and pour it over the cutlets.

  5. Serve with forcemeat balls or rashers of ham or bacon if desired.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, 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 cutlets
The main protein; beating breaks its fibers so the meat cooks up tender.
Flour
Coats the cutlets to hold in the juices, then thickens the sauce when cooked in the butter.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the pan, forming the base for the flour and sauce.
Gravy or boiling water
The liquid that becomes the sauce, carrying flavor over the cutlets.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add the gravy or boiling water. Adding the liquid slowly while stirring lets the cooked flour and butter blend smoothly. Dumping it in at once tends to form lumps that are hard to remove.

“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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