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Dessert

Sweet Patties

A pastry filled with chopped calf's foot meat, apples, candied orange, nutmeg, egg yolk, and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,230 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Sweet Patties

Oven, in the book's wordsA very quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Chop the meat of boiled calf’s foot, apples, and candied orange into very small pieces.

  2. Mix the chopped ingredients with grated nutmeg, egg yolk, and currants.

Assemble and cook

  1. Make puff pastry and roll it into different shapes.

  2. Fill the pastry with the mixture and either bake or fry them.

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. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Orange + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

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

  3. Apple + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Orange + curranttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Add moisture and a tart, fruity sweetness to the filling.
Currants
Add chewy sweetness and small bursts of fruit flavour throughout the filling.
Egg yolk
Binds the chopped filling together and adds richness.
Puff pastry
Forms the flaky, layered shell that puffs and browns in the oven or hot fat.
Candied orange
Adds concentrated sweet citrus aroma and flavour.

The step that matters

Fill the pastry with the mixture and either bake or fry them.. Overfilled pastry can leak or burst as the filling heats and expands, and wet filling can make the pastry soggy. Keeping the filling moderate and well drained helps the layers puff and seal properly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, apple, orange, nutmeg, egg):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, apple, orange, nutmeg, egg. 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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