Name: Veal Olives
Ingredients: cutlets from the gigot (leg of veal); flour; butter; forcemeat (meat mixture for filling); corn flour (for thickening); coarse sea salt; cayenne pepper; lemon juice

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 ↓

Veal Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Trim the cutlets by removing skin and bones, then cut them smaller than beef olives.
Flatten each cutlet with a rolling pin.
Make forcemeat balls the size of a small egg and place one in each cutlet.
Roll up the cutlets and secure with skewers.
Brown a little flour and butter in a stew pan, then add the olives and brown them.
Stew gently for two hours, adding veal trimmings if desired.
Thicken the gravy with corn flour, season with salt, cayenne, and lemon juice 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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,324 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,165 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,927 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, flour, butter, meat, corn, pepper):

Lemonthe original
Coconutfits about as well
Limefits about as well
Avocadofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, flour, butter, meat, corn, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.