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Veal Fricassee

A veal dish simmered with onions, flour, spices, mushrooms, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Veal Fricassee

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the veal

  1. Melt butter in a skillet and add veal pieces.

  2. Simmer and brown the veal.

  3. Add chopped onion.

  4. Cover with 1 ½ cups boiling water.

  5. Simmer until onion is tender.

Make the flour paste

  1. Brown the flour in a small skillet over low heat until light brown.

  2. Mix the browned flour with ⅔ cup hot water to form a smooth paste.

  3. Add the flour mixture to the veal.

Finish the sauce

  1. Stir in lemon juice, white pepper, cayenne pepper, and salt.

  2. Boil for one minute.

  3. Add mushrooms and cream.

  4. Adjust cream quantity for desired thickness.

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. Lemon + peppertop 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. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the tender meat that is browned and simmered until soft in the sauce.
Butter
Fat for browning the veal, adding richness and flavor to the dish.
Flour
Browned and mixed with water to form a paste that thickens the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, and its amount sets how thick it becomes.
Onion
Softens during simmering and adds sweetness and savory depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour browned slowly over low heat turns light brown and gains a nutty flavor, while too much heat can scorch it. Scorched flour tastes bitter and darkens the sauce.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, onion, flour, lemon, 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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