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To Make a Savory Lamb or Veal Pie

A savory pie filled with lamb or veal, spices, and assorted meats, topped with puff pastry and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg 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 ↓

To Make a Savory Lamb or 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. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Prepare a puff pastry crust and lay it in a pie pan.

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

Fill and bake

  1. Layer the seasoned meat in the crust with lamb stones, sweetbread, oysters, forcemeat balls, hard-boiled egg yolks, and boiled asparagus tops.

  2. Dot the filling with butter, cover with the pastry lid, and bake for 1.5 hours.

Make the liquor and serve

  1. For the liquor, mix gravy, oyster liquor, red wine, and grated nutmeg in a pot.

  2. Stir in the beaten egg yolks and cook until it boils.

  3. Pour the liquor into the pie, cover again, 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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb or veal
Forms the main body of the filling, providing savoury meaty flavour and substance.
Egg yolks
Thicken the liquor as they heat, giving it a smooth, rich, custard-like body.
Gravy
Supplies moisture and savoury depth to the liquor poured into the pie.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the filling and helps the pastry brown.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the liquor.
Oysters
Contribute a briny, savoury flavour to the filling and to the oyster liquor.

The step that matters

Stirring in the beaten egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble or curdle if they get too hot or are added too fast. Stir constantly and keep the mixture just at a boil so the liquor stays smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, pepper, clove, nutmeg, oyster, egg, asparagus):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, pepper, clove, nutmeg, oyster, egg, asparagus. 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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