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Raised Lamb Pies

A pastry pie filled with browned lamb cutlets and forcemeat, topped with pastry and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Raised Lamb Pies

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 lamb

  1. Trim the lamb cutlets nicely.

  2. Place the trimmed cutlets in a frying pan with butter, lemon juice, pepper, and salt, then cook over heat until browned.

  3. Let the browned lamb cool.

Assemble the pies

  1. Roll out pastry to about ⅛ inch thick and cut into circles for the pie bases.

  2. Place some forcemeat in the bottom of each pastry base, then add the cooled cutlets on top.

  3. Cover with another layer of pastry and seal the edges by pinching.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 30 minutes.

  2. Once baked, remove the top crust.

  3. Pour a good brown sauce over the pies.

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. Lamb + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,165 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Provides the main meat filling, which browns to develop savory flavor before baking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness while the lamb browns in the pan.
Forcemeat
Forms a moist, savory layer that sits beneath the lamb inside the pastry.
Flour
Builds the structure of the pastry that encloses and holds the filling.
Egg yolk
Seals the pastry edges and browns the crust during baking.

The step that matters

Cooling the browned lamb before assembling. Placing hot cutlets on raw pastry and forcemeat can melt the fat and soften the dough, making the base soggy and the seal weak before baking.

“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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