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Olive Pie

A veal pie with lemon, nutmeg, and gravy, topped with butter and a light crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Olive Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut thin slices of veal.

  2. Rub slices with egg yolks.

  3. Sprinkle egg-yolk-coated slices with bread crumbs.

  4. Shred lemon peel finely and add it to the veal with nutmeg, pepper, and salt.

  5. Roll the veal slices tightly.

Assemble and cover the pie

  1. Place the rolled veal in a pewter dish.

  2. Pour gravy over the veal.

  3. Add butter on top of the gravy.

  4. Make a light paste.

  5. Lay the paste around the dish.

  6. Roll the lid to ½ inch thick.

  7. Place the lid over the pie.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Forms the main body of the pie, becoming tender and savoury as it cooks.
Egg yolks
Bind the bread crumbs to the veal slices and add richness to the filling.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and help hold the coated veal slices together.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, enriching the gravy as it melts over the veal.
Gravy
Provides moisture and savoury flavour, keeping the veal from drying out.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, egg, bread, lemon, pepper, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Sagefits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, egg, bread, lemon, pepper, butter. 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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