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A Savoury Lamb or Veal Pie

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 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 ↓

A Savoury Lamb or Veal Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Make a puff pastry crust.

  2. Cut the lamb or veal into pieces and season with pepper, coarse sea salt, mace, clove, and nutmeg.

Assemble and bake

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

  2. Dot the filling with butter and cover with the pastry lid.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 1.5 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Mix red wine with grated nutmeg and egg yolks, stirring continuously until it boils.

  2. Pour the mixture into the pie and replace the lid.

  3. 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the wine mixture into a sauce and enrich the filling as they set.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the filling and helps the pastry brown.
Puff pastry crust
Forms a flaky, crisp shell that holds the filling and browns in the oven.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the sauce poured into the pie.

The step that matters

Stirring the wine, nutmeg and egg yolk mixture. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can scramble if they get too hot or stop being stirred. Constant stirring keeps the sauce smooth until it boils and thickens.

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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