Name: Leg of Veal and Bacon, to Boil
Ingredients: 1 leg of veal; slices of bacon; lemon peel; coarse sea salt; green sauce (sorrel, vinegar, sugar)

Why it works: Lemon and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 149 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Leg of Veal and Bacon, to Boil

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Lard the veal with bacon and lemon peel.

Cook

Boil the veal with a piece of bacon cut into slices.

Serve

Place the veal in a dish and arrange the bacon around it.
Serve with green sauce made by beating sorrel with vinegar and sugar.

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.

Lemon + sorreltop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together149 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,147 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,806 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Veal + lemontop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Sorrel + vinegartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together101 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bacon: Adds fat and savory flavor to the veal as it cooks and is larded through the meat.
Veal leg: Main cut of meat that becomes tender and moist during long gentle boiling.
Sorrel: Provides a sharp, tangy green flavor for the sauce.

Swap the sorrel

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, lemon, sauce, vinegar, sugar):

Tarragonfits better
Capersfits better
Parsleyfits better
Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, lemon, sauce, vinegar, 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.