Name: Veal Cutlets Stewed with Celery
Ingredients: Veal cutlets; 3-4 heads of celery; Coarse sea salt; Pepper; Stewed onion; Butter; Flour; Lemon; Small forcemeat balls

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 Cutlets Stewed with Celery

Ingredients

Directions

Cut the cutlets from the neck of the veal, ensuring they are shaped well.
Make gravy from the bones by stewing them with the celery, salt, pepper, and onion.
Strain the gravy and return the celery to it.
Thicken the gravy with butter and flour, then pour it hot over the cutlets.
Stew the cutlets until tender and garnish with lemon and fried forcemeat balls.

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).
Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,467 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,518 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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

Swap the onion

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

Carrotfits better
Leekfits better
Shallotfits better
Onionthe original

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