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Egg Mince Pies

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 10,634 recipes mention both. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Egg Mince Pies

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the eggs hard and chop them finely.

  2. Shred the suet into small pieces, using double the quantity of suet compared to eggs.

  3. Wash and pick the currants, using 1 pound or more if the eggs are large.

  4. Finely shred the peel of one lemon and add its juice.

  5. Mix in 6 tablespoons of sweet wine, mace, nutmeg, sugar, and a pinch of salt.

  6. Add the candied orange, lemon, and citron to the mixture.

  7. Prepare a light pastry for the crust.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Nutmeg + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,746 recipes

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

  5. Currant + macetop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together1,791 recipes

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

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

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, currant, lemon, wine, nutmeg, sugar, orange):

  1. Cinnamonbetter flavor fit
  2. Allspicebetter flavor fit
  3. Cardamombetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, currant, lemon, wine, nutmeg, sugar, orange. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

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