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Minced Veal with Cream and Egg

A dish of minced veal simmered with a cream sauce and boiled egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Minced Veal with Cream and Egg

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the egg for 20 minutes.

  2. While the egg is boiling, pick the cold veal into small pieces.

  3. To make the cream sauce, rub together 1 tablespoon of flour and 1 tablespoon of butter until creamy, then stir this mixture into ½ cup of boiling milk until it thickens.

Make the veal dish

  1. Heat the veal with ½ cup of water, but do not allow it to boil.

  2. Season with salt and a dust of red pepper.

  3. When hot, add the cream sauce to the veal.

  4. Chop the boiled egg and add it to the veal mixture.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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 main body of the dish, with its protein giving the mixture substance once heated.
Flour
Thickens the cream sauce when cooked into the hot milk, giving it body.
Butter
Mixed with flour to form a roux-like paste that helps the sauce thicken smoothly and adds richness.
Milk
Forms the base of the cream sauce, thickening as the flour starches set in the heat.
Egg
Chopped when boiled and stirred through, adding firm texture and richness to the veal.

The step that matters

Keep the veal below boiling. Boiling toughens the proteins in meat, making veal dry and firm, so it should only be heated gently until hot.

“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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