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Veal Pie, Raised

A veal pie with a pastry crust, seasoned with mace, lemon rind, onion, and sweet herbs, optionally containing bacon and forcemeat balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Veal Pie, Raised

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 veal

  1. Combine veal, mace, lemon rind, onion, and sweet herbs in a pot.

  2. Add enough water to barely cover the meat.

  3. Heat gently and stew the veal for about 1.5 hours until nearly done.

  4. Let it cool, then remove the fat.

Assemble and bake

  1. Layer the meat in a pie dish, adding bacon and forcemeat balls if desired.

  2. Strain some stock over the meat.

  3. Line the edges of the dish with pastry, cover with more pastry, and make a hole in the center.

  4. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

  5. Boil any unused gravy and pour 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Mace + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Veal + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,580 recipes

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

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow, gentle stewing.
Pastry
Forms the crust that encloses the meat and holds in the juices while baking.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma and body to the stock the meat stews in.
Lemon rind
Adds bright aromatic flavour that lightens the richness of the meat.

The step that matters

Stewing the veal gently until nearly done. Simmering slowly rather than boiling keeps the meat tender and stops proteins tightening into dry, stringy fibres. Removing the fat after cooling also keeps the filling from tasting greasy.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

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

  1. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  2. Thymebetter flavor fit
  3. Marjorambetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, lemon, onion, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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