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Dessert

Puff Paste

A pastry filled with minced meat, coated in egg wash and bread crumbs, then fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Puff Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut puff pastry into two-inch square pieces.

  2. Place a teaspoonful of minced meat in the center of each piece.

  3. Fold the pastry over the filling and shape it with a cutter, ensuring the edges are sealed.

Coat and fry

  1. Brush the shapes with egg wash and dip them in bread crumbs.

  2. Fry the shapes in lard until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve dry, garnished with fried parsley.

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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Meat + parsleytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,040 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Egg + parsleytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Puff paste
Forms the flaky, layered outer casing that puffs and crisps when fried.
Minced meat
Provides the savoury filling that is enclosed inside the pastry.
Egg
Egg wash gives the coating a glossy surface and helps the crumbs adhere and brown.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden outer crust that browns during frying.

The step that matters

Sealing the edges before frying. If the edges are not firmly sealed, filling can leak into the hot lard and the pastry may open or burst, so the shapes should be pressed closed before coating and frying.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, egg, bread. 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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