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French Pie

A puff pastry pie filled with minced veal, ham, and oysters in a rich gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

French Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Mince cold roast veal and ham.

  2. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, mace, and lemon peel.

  3. Add mushroom catsup, oysters with their liquor, and rich gravy.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line a dish with puff paste.

  2. Fill with the mixture, cover with puff paste, and bake until the paste is cooked.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Ham + oystertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold roast veal
Provides the bulk of the meat, which the other ingredients season and bind together.
Ham
Adds salty, savoury depth to the meat filling.
Oysters
Add a briny, savoury flavour and moisture to the filling.
Rich gravy
Moistens the minced meat so the filling stays juicy under the pastry.
Puff paste
Forms the flaky crust that encloses the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Bake until the paste is cooked. Puff pastry needs enough oven heat to rise and set into flaky layers. Underbaked pastry stays doughy and soggy, especially over a moist meat filling.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, pepper, lemon, mushroom, oyster):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, pepper, lemon, mushroom, oyster. 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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