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Veal Pie

A pie with veal cutlets, bacon or ham, boiled eggs, flour, short crust pastry, and water for gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Veal 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.

Prepare

  1. Season the veal cutlets well and place them in a pie dish.

  2. Add layers of bacon or ham slices and sliced boiled eggs, sprinkling a little flour over each layer.

  3. Cover with short crust pastry and add a little water for gravy.

Bake

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for one hour.

  2. If the crust browns too quickly, cover it with paper until the meat is cooked.

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.

  1. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Veal + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,264 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Ham + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,526 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Veal + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,845 recipes

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

  5. Veal + flourtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,886 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

What each ingredient does

Veal cutlets
Form the main body of the pie and become tender as they cook through.
Bacon or ham slices
Add salty, savoury fat that flavours the meat and filling as it cooks.
Sliced boiled eggs
Add richness and a firm, sliceable texture to the filling layers.
Flour
Thickens the juices released by the meat into a light gravy.
Short crust pastry
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form the crust.

The step that matters

Covering the crust when it browns too fast. Short crust pastry browns faster than the meat cooks through. Covering it with paper slows browning so the veal can reach full doneness without the crust burning.

“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.

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