Name: Veal Pot Pie
Ingredients: any piece of veal; salt; pepper; rich biscuit dough; flour

Why it works: Biscuit and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 889 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Veal Pot Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Season the veal with salt and pepper, then stew until tender.
Transfer the veal to a roaster.
Prepare dumplings by rolling the biscuit dough to the thickness of pie crust and cutting into squares.
Dredge the top of the dumplings with flour.
Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until the dumplings are cooked through.

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.

Biscuit + flourtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together889 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Pepper + biscuittop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together841 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50,459 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Veal + peppertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,049 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Veal + flourtop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,886 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).