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Dessert

Veal and Ham Pie

A savory pie with veal, ham, bacon, hard‑boiled eggs, parsley, lemon rind, and puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Veal and Ham Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove skin and sinews from the veal and cut it into thin slices.

  2. Cut the ham into similar thin slices.

  3. Layer the veal, ham, and bacon in a pie dish, adding slices of hard-boiled egg between layers.

  4. Sprinkle each layer with salt, pepper, lemon rind, and chopped parsley.

  5. Use a total of 1 teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon pepper; add a pinch of nutmeg last.

  6. Pour in about ½ cup of stock or water.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line the edge of the pie dish with a strip of pastry and brush it with beaten egg.

  2. Roll out more pastry to cover the pie, trim the edges, and make a hole in the center.

  3. Brush the top with egg and decorate with pastry shapes if desired.

  4. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for about 1 to 1½ hours.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or, for cold serving, dissolve ½ oz gelatine and mix with 1 teaspoon extract of meat, pouring it into the pie after baking.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the main meat texture and savoury flavour once cooked through.
Ham
Adds salty, savoury flavour that seasons the layered filling.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, crisp, golden crust that encloses the filling.
Eggs
Bind the pastry edge and top, and set the hard-boiled layers in the pie.
Streaky bacon
Adds fat and smoky flavour that moistens the lean veal during baking.

The step that matters

Bake the pie at a moderate oven temperature. Cooking the lean veal gently lets it become tender and cooked through while the pastry sets and browns. Excess heat can toughen the meat and burn the crust before the filling is done.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, parsley, pepper, egg, ham, lemon. 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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