Name: Cotelettes De Veau Aux Fines Herbes
Ingredients: butter; veal cutlets; pepper; coarse sea salt; spices; fine herbs; mushrooms; lemon juice

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,047 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cotelettes De Veau Aux Fines Herbes

Ingredients

Directions

Melt butter in a stewpan.
Add veal cutlets, season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and spices, and fry for a few minutes.
Chop fine herbs and mushrooms.
When cutlets are browned, sprinkle half the herbs and mushrooms over them.
Turn cutlets and add the remaining herbs and mushrooms on the other side.
Let them stew slowly until cooked through.
Remove from heat, add lemon juice to the sauce.
Arrange cutlets in a crown on a dish and pour gravy into the center.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together2,446 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together4,633 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).