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Veal Pie

A savory pie of stewed veal, ham, hard‑boiled egg yolks, mushrooms, and butter‑flour pastry baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Veal 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 veal

  1. Remove the bone, fat, and skin from the veal.

  2. Stew the veal in ½ pint of water.

Make the paste

  1. Make a good paste by mixing 1 pound of butter with flour.

  2. Divide the paste into two pieces and roll them out thick.

Assemble and bake

  1. Cover the sides and bottom of a deep dish with one piece of paste.

  2. Layer the veal seasoned with pepper and salt, then add a layer of cold ham, and repeat until the dish is full.

  3. Interspersed the meat with yolks of hard-boiled eggs and optional mushrooms.

  4. Pour in the gravy from the stewed veal.

  5. Cover with the second piece of paste, notching the edge and decorating the center with a paste flower.

  6. Bake the pie at 350°F (175°C) for at least 2.5 hours.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 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. Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,446 recipes

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

  5. Ham + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,486 recipes

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

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

Veal
Forms the main meat filling, becoming tender and moist as it stews and bakes.
Butter
Enriches the paste, adding fat that makes it rich and short in texture.
Flour
Forms the structure of the paste that encloses the filling.
Cold ham
Adds savory, salty flavor between the layers of veal.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a creamy, crumbly texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Stewing the veal in water. Stewing gently until the meat is tender before baking matters because the veal needs to be cooked through and softened, and the stewing liquid becomes the gravy poured into the pie.

“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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