Skip to main content
Main

Beef Pees Raised with Truffles

A beef pie with a fat bacon crust, light forcemeat, green truffles, veal broth sauce, baked for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Beef Pees Raised with Truffles

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the pie

  1. Bone the beef and daub it with pieces of fat bacon.

  2. Place the beef into a raised crust with light forcemeat and surround it with whole green truffles.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover with a crust, garnish, and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 2 hours.

  2. Combine veal broth, lemon pickle, bay leaf, chopped shallots, and cayenne pepper in a saucepan; make a sauce.

  3. After 2 hours, remove the top of the pie, skim off the fat, glaze the rump, and serve.

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 + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Truffle + vealtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together815 recipes

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

  5. Beef + vealtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fat bacon
Bastes the lean beef with fat as it cooks, keeping it moist and adding savory flavor.
Green truffles
Add an intense, earthy aroma that perfumes the meat and the surrounding forcemeat.
Veal broth
Forms the base of the sauce, adding savory depth and body.
Lemon pickle
Adds sharp acidity that balances the richness of the meat and the sauce.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, truffle, veal, lemon, pepper):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, truffle, veal, lemon, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Beef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipes