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Lamb Pasty

A pastry filled with seasoned lamb and suet, baked until golden and served with vinegar, egg yolk, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Lamb Pasty

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. Cut the boned lamb into four pieces.

  2. Place the beef suet at the bottom of a pastry dish.

  3. Season the lamb with pepper, salt, thyme, nutmeg, cloves, and mace.

  4. Lay the seasoned lamb on top of the suet, forming a high border with the pastry.

Bake and finish

  1. Cover the lamb with a sheet of pastry and seal it.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

  3. Once baked, add vinegar, beaten egg yolks, and gravy.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Thyme + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and rich during slow baking under pastry.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the meat moist and carries flavour through the pastry.
Pastry dough
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven, forming a sealed case.
Egg yolks
Beaten yolks add richness and enrich the sauce added after baking.

The step that matters

Seal the pastry over the lamb. A tight seal keeps steam and juices inside so the meat cooks moist; gaps let the filling dry out and leak during baking.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, beef, pepper, thyme, nutmeg, clove, vinegar):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, beef, pepper, thyme, nutmeg, clove, vinegar. 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.

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