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Veal with Bread Noodles

A veal dish served with bread noodles, seasoned 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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the noodles

  1. Make a dough with the egg and enough flour to form a soft mixture.

  2. Roll out the dough to a thickness that is not too thin.

  3. Once dried, cut the dough into strips about the width of a finger.

Cook the veal

  1. Rub the veal with coarse sea salt.

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

  3. Add vinegar, capers, pepper, and sugar to the meat.

  4. Thicken the mixture with flour stirred in cold water.

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

  6. Cover the kettle and place it in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) with one hot stone underneath for 1 hour.

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
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, moist cooking.
Egg
Binds the flour into a dough that holds its shape when rolled and cut.
Flour
Forms the noodle dough and thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce.
Butter
Fat that browns the surface of the veal and adds richness.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the meat's richness.

The step that matters

Fry the veal until golden. Browning the meat surface through Maillard reactions builds deep flavour in the sauce. Turning it often helps even colour and prevents scorching in the butter, so the pieces brown rather than steam.

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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