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Seasoning Salt for Pies

A blend of white pepper, coarse sea salt, mace, nutmeg, cloves, sweet basil, thyme, and parsley used as seasoning for pies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Seasoning Salt for Pies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the seasoning

  1. Mix the white pepper with the coarse sea salt.

  2. Optionally, add ½ ounce each of mace, nutmeg, and cloves to the seasoning salt.

  3. Add ¼ ounce of sweet basil, and dried thyme and parsley as desired.

  4. Store the mixtures separately for convenience.

Use

  1. Use about ½ ounce of this mixture for each pound of meat.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Basil + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

  4. Basil + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

White pepper
Provides the main sharp, pungent seasoning flavor in the blend.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and carries the other spices evenly through the blend.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic flavor that complements savory pie fillings.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, sweet-spiced aroma to the seasoning.
Cloves
Adds a strong, warm aroma that rounds out the spice blend.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mace, nutmeg, clove, basil, thyme, parsley):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mace, nutmeg, clove, basil, thyme, parsley. 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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