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To Make Small Pasties

Small pastry pockets filled with minced veal or mutton kidneys and egg yolks, fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Veal and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 28% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,845 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Make Small Pasties

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Mince the veal or mutton kidneys and mix with the yolks of two hard boiled eggs.

  2. Season the mixture to taste.

Shape the pasties

  1. Cut out circles of puff pastry using a round fluted cutter the size of a breakfast cup.

  2. Wet the edges of the pastry circles.

  3. Place a small amount of the mince mixture on one half of each pastry circle.

  4. Fold the pastry over to create a pocket and seal the edges.

Fry

  1. Fry the pasties in lard until they are a nice brown color.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal or mutton kidneys
Forms the savoury, meaty filling that the pastry encloses.
Hard boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a crumbly, binding texture to the minced filling.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, layered shell that puffs and crisps when cooked.
Lard
Conducts heat for frying and promotes browning of the pastry surface.

The step that matters

Fry the pasties in lard until they are a nice brown color. Frying in hot fat browns the pastry through the Maillard reaction and sets its layers. If the fat is not hot enough, the pastry absorbs grease and turns soggy instead of crisp.

“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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