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Ham En Panier

Ham en Panier is a dish of bread rolls filled with a ham and egg mixture, garnished with watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 293 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ham En Panier

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 rolls

  1. Cut a slice from each roll and scoop out the soft center.

  2. Dry the bread shells in a 400°F (200°C) oven until slightly browned.

Make the filling

  1. Mince the ham and 2 of the hard-cooked eggs, then heat them in the white sauce.

  2. Add chopped parsley, pepper, coarse sea salt, and made mustard to the mixture.

Fill and serve

  1. Fill the bread cases with the ham mixture.

  2. Garnish with slices of the remaining egg and sprigs of watercress.

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. Mustard + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together293 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + watercresstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked ham
Provides the main savory filling and meaty bulk of the dish.
White sauce
Binds the minced ham into a moist, creamy filling.
Hard-cooked eggs
Add body and richness to the filling, and their sliced whites and yolks make the garnish.
Small rolls
Form edible shells that hold the filling and crisp slightly when dried in the oven.

The step that matters

Drying the bread shells. Baking the empty shells until slightly browned firms the crumb and creates a barrier, so the hot, wet filling does not soften them into a soggy case.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, sauce, egg, pepper, mustard, watercress):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Celeryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, sauce, egg, pepper, mustard, watercress. 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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