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Lamb Patties

Lamb patties made with stewed lamb, salt pork, celery, flour, egg yolk, and milk, wrapped in flaky crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Lamb Patties

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Stew lamb and salt pork gently for 10-15 minutes.

  2. Season with pepper, salt, celery, and yellow top.

  3. Stir in flour, egg yolk, and enough milk to form a thin batter. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Assemble and serve

  1. Prepare the patties: make patties from flaky crust, cut round and the size of a small sauce plate, then cut the center of each patty halfway through to create a cover.

  2. Fill each crust with a spoonful of the stew and place the top on.

  3. 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. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  2. Lamb + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together623 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Pork + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Neck or breast of lamb
Provides the main meat and richness of the filling as it stews.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the stewed filling.
Flour
Thickens the milk and egg mixture into a binding batter.
Egg yolk
Enriches the batter and helps it set and bind when heated.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour, egg yolk and milk, then boil. The batter must be thin and evenly mixed before boiling, so the flour can cook through and thicken without lumps or scorching.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, pork, pepper, flour, egg, milk):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, pork, pepper, flour, egg, milk. 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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