Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓
Quenelles of Veal
Ingredients
Directions
In a saucepan, mix ⅓ cup butter and 2 oz flour with a wooden spoon.
Add ½ cup white stock and stir until it boils and thickens.
Pour the mixture onto a plate and let it cool.
Trim the skin and fat from the veal and cut it into small pieces.
Pound the veal pieces in a mortar until well ground.
Pass the pounded meat through a wire sieve into the cooled panada.
In the mortar, combine half of the panada and 1 egg, and pound to a cream.
Add half of the pounded veal, salt, and pepper, and mix well.
Incorporate the remaining panada, another egg, and the rest of the veal, and pound again.
Transfer the mixture to a basin.
Butter a sauté pan and prepare to cook the quenelles.
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.
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Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together27,047 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
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Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together12,525 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
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Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together41,516 recipes
Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
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Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together13,580 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Butter and flour 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
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