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Veal Rolls or Mock Birds

Veal rolls stuffed with bread dressing or ham, browned, simmered in stock, finished with sour cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Veal Rolls or Mock Birds

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the roll

  1. Spread veal steak with bread dressing or fill with chopped boiled ham, butter, salt, pepper, parsley, and onion.

  2. Roll the veal and secure with a toothpick.

Brown and cook

  1. Brown the rolls well in hot butter.

  2. Add soup stock and flour, then cook until tender.

  3. Stir in sour cream shortly before serving.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal steak
Forms the outer wrap that holds the filling and becomes tender during slow cooking.
Bread dressing
Provides a moist, savoury filling that keeps the roll juicy as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the rolls and enriching the flavour.
Soup stock
Supplies liquid for gentle moist cooking that softens the veal.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce.
Sour cream
Adds tangy richness and creaminess to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Brown the rolls well in hot butter. Deep browning through the Maillard reaction builds savoury flavour and colour on the surface. Pale rolls taste flatter, and a sour cream sauce added to a boiling liquid can curdle, so it is stirred in shortly before serving.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, bread, butter, pepper, parsley, flour, cream):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, bread, butter, pepper, parsley, flour, cream. 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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