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Puff-paste Patties, with Fish-force-meat

Puff pastry rounds filled with fish forcemeat, seasoned with anchovy extract and parsley, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 637 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Puff-paste Patties, with Fish-force-meat

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a good oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine fish forcemeat, anchovy extract, and chopped parsley.

Bake and serve

  1. Garnish fifteen small rounds of puff pastry with the mixture.

  2. Glaze with egg and bake in a warm oven at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes.

  3. Remove from the oven, detach from the baking sheet, and arrange in a pyramid on a dish or folded napkin.

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. Fish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together637 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Fish + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together479 recipes

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

  3. Anchovy + eggtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,330 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Meat + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together335 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Anchovy + parsleytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,702 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish forcemeat
Forms the savoury filling that bakes inside the pastry, giving it a moist, tender body.
Anchovy extract
Adds a salty, savoury depth of flavour to the fish filling.
Puff paste
Bakes into flaky, layered rises that hold the filling in small rounds.
Egg
Glazes the surface, promoting golden browning in the oven.

The step that matters

Glaze with egg and bake in a warm oven. The egg glaze must cover the pastry evenly so it browns uniformly. Baking at a steady warm temperature lets the layers puff and set before the filling dries out.

Swap the parsley

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, meat, anchovy, egg. 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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