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Forcemeat Turnovers

A pastry turnover filled with a mixture of chopped cold fowl, sausage meat, mushrooms, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Meat and rabbit work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 315 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Forcemeat Turnovers

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 the filling

  1. Remove the bones from the cold fowl and chop the meat.

  2. Chop the mushrooms and add them to the mixture.

  3. Add a little gravy to the chopped fowl.

  4. Add the sausage meat and mix well to create a forcemeat.

  5. If available, add any remains of cold game or rabbit.

Shape and cook

  1. Roll out the pastry dough into rounds about 5 inches across.

  2. Place some of the forcemeat on one half of each pastry round.

  3. Fold the pastry over and seal the edges.

  4. Bake at 400°F (200°C) or fry in butter until golden and serve hot.

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. Meat + rabbittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together315 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Mushroom + rabbittop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together406 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Mushroom + meattop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,423 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Pastry dough
Forms the outer crust that encloses the filling and browns during cooking.
Cold cooked fowl
Provides the main meat body of the forcemeat filling.
Sausage meat
Adds fat and richness to the forcemeat, keeping the filling moist.
Mushrooms
Add moisture and earthy flavour to the forcemeat filling.
Gravy
Adds moisture and savoury flavour that binds the chopped fowl.

The step that matters

Seal the edges of the turnovers. If the edges are not sealed firmly, the filling can leak out and escape during baking or frying, leaving the turnovers dry and the crust uneven.

“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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