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Dessert

Raised Pies

Raised pies are made from flour, suet or butter, water, and bran filling, then baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Raised Pies

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a brisk oven”. The 400°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

  1. In a saucepan, melt the suet or butter with 1 ½ pints of water over medium heat until it boils.

  2. Make a well in the flour and pour in the hot suet or butter mixture.

  3. Stir in enough flour with a spoon until the mixture is cool enough to handle.

  4. Knead the dough until smooth, then cover it with a cloth and let it rest in a warm place.

Form and bake

  1. Use pieces of dough to form your pie, filling it with clean bran to help it retain shape while baking.

  2. Seal the pie, wash the top with beaten egg, and decorate as desired.

  3. Bake small pies in a hot oven (400°F) and larger ones in a moderate oven (350°F).

Fill and serve

  1. After baking, cut off the top, remove the bran, and fill the pie.

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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Mutton + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,648 recipes

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

  3. Flour + muttontop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the dough's structure once the hot fat mixture is stirred in.
Suet or butter
Adds fat and tenderness, and helps the dough hold its shape.
Water
Melts the fat and helps bind the dough together.
Egg
Gives the top a glossy, browned finish when brushed on before baking.

The step that matters

Stirring in the hot fat mixture while it is still hot. Hot fat coats and partly cooks the flour starch, so the dough stays workable and firm. If the mixture cools too much before kneading, it becomes hard to shape and may crack during baking.

“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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