Name: Blanquette De Veau Aux Champignons En Croustade
Ingredients: 1 piece of veal (shoulder or similar); ¼ of the amount of veal in mushrooms, sliced; 1 recipe of Allemande sauce; 1 pastry crust (4 cm high, fitting the serving dish)

Why it works: Veal and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,446 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Blanquette De Veau Aux Champignons En Croustade

Ingredients

1 piece of veal (shoulder or similar)
¼ of the amount of veal in mushrooms, sliced
1 recipe of Allemande sauce
1 pastry crust (4 cm high, fitting the serving dish)

Directions

Prepare the veal

Roast the veal until cooked, then let it cool.
Slice the veal into escalopes, each 1.2 cm thick.

Assemble and fill

Slice the mushrooms, using a quarter of the veal's weight.
Mix the veal and mushrooms with the Allemande sauce.
Place the mixture into a pastry crust, forming a pyramid in the center.

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.

Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,446 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Mushroom + saucetop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,480 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Veal + saucetop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,072 recipes

Shared aroma: decanoic acid (soapy, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal: Provides the main meat texture and bulk of the filling once roasted and sliced.
Mushrooms: Add moisture and savory, earthy flavor that complements the veal.
Allemande sauce: Binds the meat and mushrooms together and adds richness and moisture to the filling.
Pastry crust: Encloses the filling and gives the dish its structure and crisp exterior.

“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.