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Veal with Bread Noodles

A veal dish served with bread noodle strips, flavored with vinegar, capers, pepper, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,024 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Veal with Bread Noodles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the noodles

  1. Make a dough with the egg and flour.

  2. Roll it out not too thin and let it dry.

  3. Cut into finger-width strips.

Brown and season the veal

  1. Rub the veal with salt.

  2. Heat butter in a kettle and fry the meat until yellow, turning several times.

  3. Add vinegar, capers, pepper, and sugar.

  4. Thicken with flour stirred in cold water.

Cook and serve

  1. Carefully place the noodles on top of the meat and let boil for 10 minutes.

  2. Place the covered kettle into a caloric oven with one hot stone underneath and cook for 1¼ hours.

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. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Capers + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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
Long, slow cooking breaks down its connective tissue, making the meat tender and moist.
Egg
Binds the flour and water so the dough holds together as a sheet of noodles.
Flour
Forms the noodle dough and thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce.
Butter
Fat that carries heat for frying and adds browning and rich flavor to the meat.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the meat.

The step that matters

Fry the veal until well browned. Frying the meat in hot butter and turning it creates browned surfaces through the Maillard reaction, which builds the deep savory flavor of the finished dish. Crowding the pan or cooking at too low a heat makes the meat steam, leaving it pale and bland.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, flour, veal, butter, vinegar, pepper, sugar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, veal, butter, vinegar, pepper, sugar. 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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