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Veal and Ham Pie

A savory pie filled with veal, ham, mushrooms, parsley, and egg yolks in a Veloute sauce, topped with puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Veal and Ham Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim the veal and ham into scallops and season with pepper and salt.

  2. Chop the mushrooms and parsley finely.

Make the filling

  1. In a small pan, melt the butter and fry the mushrooms, parsley, and chopped shallot lightly.

  2. Add the Veloute sauce or stock and boil for five minutes.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the mixture into the pie crust and place the hard-boiled egg yolks in the cavities.

  2. Cover with puff pastry, bake for 1.5 hours, and serve.

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. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Mushroom + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

  4. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 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
Forms the meaty body of the filling, giving it substance and a tender bite when cooked.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour that stands out against the mild veal and sauce.
Butter
Fat that softens the mushrooms, parsley and shallot and carries their flavour.
Veloute sauce or stock
Liquid that moistens the filling and binds the meat into a sauce-like mixture.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a firm, crumbly texture to the filling.
Puff pastry
Forms the flaky, buttery crust that rises and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Boiling the sauce mixture before filling the pie. Boiling for five minutes reduces the liquid and cooks the shallot and mushrooms, so the filling is not watery. A wet filling can make the pastry base soggy as it bakes.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, pepper, mushroom, butter, shallot, sauce):

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, pepper, mushroom, butter, shallot, sauce. 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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