Embutido pâté en crôute
a melding of two christmas traditions
✨ Welcome to Singapore Noodles, a weekly newsletter dedicated to celebrating Asian culinary traditions—the traditional cooking techniques, rich food histories, and personal stories that make each dish more than just a recipe. Archived recipes and other content can be found on the index. This newsletter is 100% reader-funded; your paid subscription directly supports the writing and research, pays guest contributors, and gives you access to all content and recipes. In the lead-up to Christmas, I’m offering a 20% discount for annual subscriptions. As the newsletter grows, I’m eager to expand our community of guest contributors who will share their expertise and food stories with you. Thank you for being here and enjoy this week’s newsletter! - Pamelia ✨
With the advent of the internet, the landscape of cookbooks is changing. For my mother’s generation of cooks, cookbooks were one of the primary sources of recipes, alongside newspaper clippings, TV cooking shows, and recipes printed on the backs of flour packets or canned foods. These days, however, with so many recipes being available online, cookbooks need to offer more. The ones I gravitate toward now aren’t just fantastic collections of recipes; they weave together well-written, reliable recipes with vivid photography, strong story-telling, and a compelling point of view.
One of the most engaging cookbooks I’ve read recently is Filipinx by Angela Dimayuga and Ligaya Mishan. I appreciate how Dimayuga weaves her technical expertise as a chef into the recipes in the book, while still maintaining the heartiness and bold flavours that define much of Filipino cooking. I am also a fan of Mishan’s prose in the New York Times. Together, they make formidable cookbook co-authors.
One dish in the book that makes a solid impression is embutido, which Dimayuga refers to as a “pork galantine.” Embutido is a traditional dish in the Philippines, commonly prepared for the Christmas Eve feast following midnight mass. Introduced during the Spanish colonial period, the term originally referred to Spanish-style sausages, but following the American occupation, it evolved to something more akin to American meatloaf. Combining elements of both Spanish and American cuisines, it is typically stuffed with hard-boiled eggs, sausages (such as hot dogs and chorizo), raisins, and sweet pickles. In Dimayuga’s words: “And while embutido might look humble from the outside, cut in and its elegance is revealed: a cross-section of golden yolk, pork, gleams of pickle, plump raisins, and scarlet flecks of chorizo”.
Last week, I made embutido—and because I couldn’t resist tinkering with it—as pâté en crôute (literally a ground meat mixture encased in pastry). The latter is a centuries-old dish that was first developed out of economy in France as a way to preserve meat and offal. These days, it has a somewhat old-fashioned, rustic appeal—something you might find on the menu at a charming little brasserie in France or in the display case of a dedicated, independent butcher—though there is a growing brood of chefs who are reimagining this pastry as a sophisticated centrepiece. It felt like there was no better time to make it than now, given that the pastry’s resurgence in popularity have made it a part of holiday feasts, just as embutido is.
The pastry for pâté en croûte is not difficult; it’s a straightforward mix-in-one-bowl situation. If you can make shortcrust pastry, you can make this. Adding some cornflour and a tiny drizzle of vinegar to the dough helps to inhibit gluten formation, thereby making rolling out the pastry a dream. For the embutido filling, instead of ground pork, I used meat squeezed from raw sausages (which greatly reduces anxiety about meat texture because sausages are always perfectly juicy and harbour enough fat).
For a beautiful presentation, I wanted to showcase perfectly hard-boiled eggs in the centre of each slice. There are two tricks here: one, boil the eggs for as little time as you can get by. I cook mine for six minutes, which keeps them easy to peel while provides sufficient leeway to avoid the grey ring of overcooked yolk after baking. Second: slice off excess whites so that every slice of the resulting pâté en croûte showcases a beautiful cross-section of white and yolk.
You’ll need to create vents for air to escape from the pastry; I simply used bottle caps. If you want to adhere to tradition, these vents are also where you would pour stock with dissolved gelatine into. As the pâté en croûte cools, there will be some separation between the pastry and the slightly shrunken meat filling. This jelly will fill in any gaps. Rather than going through the trouble of making stock, I dissolved the drippings from the pan in water and added a little dark soy sauce. I was worried about the pastry getting soggy in the refrigerator, but it was surprisingly still delightfully crisp and snappy after an overnight rest.
What I appreciated about the embutido pâté en croûte is that, while it is definitely savoury, it has hints of sweetness from the raisin and the pastry. Almost made me wish the weather was good enough for a picnic. Even if you’re not having company over this holiday season, this pastry keeps very well; we continued picking at it for breakfast and tea time throughout the week. If you want to turn it into a meal, all it needs is a lightly dressed salad. Dimayuga’s cookbook also helpfully suggests other ways to enjoy embutido: as a baked meatloaf-style dish glazed with ketchup out of the oven; or as chicken relleno, where the mixture is stuffed into a whole roast chicken, making it worthy of any holiday table.
🎄✨ With the gifting season upon us, support your favourite authors by purchasing their books! My second cookbook Plantasia was created in response to the growing meat-centric nature of modern diets. Instead of “veganising" traditional Asian meat and seafood dishes, Plantasia highlights the resourceful and ingenious ways Asia has celebrated plants for centuries, revealing the significance of ingredients like young jackfruit, gluten, and tempeh to Asian communities—long before these became trendy “meat substitutes”. As we approach Christmas, I’m offering a one-for-one deal to help you check off a few names on your gifting list. This applies to orders worldwide. If there’s a vegetable lover in your life or if you’re looking to incorporate more vegetables into your diet in 2025, now is the perfect time to get a copy of the book!
Embutido pâté en croûte
Makes one 9 x 4-inch pâté en croûte