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Beef Pie Made with Stewed Shin

A savory pie made from stewed shin beef, onions, turnip, carrot, and optional kidney and mushrooms, topped with suet pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Pie Made with Stewed Shin

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the beef

  1. Stew the shin of beef slowly for about 3 hours with the onions, turnip, carrot, and water.

  2. Add the salt and black pepper, ensuring the meat cooks tender without falling apart.

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove the meat.

  2. Slice it thinly across the grain. Mince it.

  3. Mash the cooked vegetables.

  4. Mix them with the minced meat in a basin.

  5. Reduce the gravy by boiling it slowly in an open pan until it thickens to about ½ pint.

  6. Pour the gravy over the meat and vegetable mixture.

  7. If desired, add minced uncooked ox kidney and finely chopped mushrooms.

Make the pie

  1. Make a suet paste by mixing suet and flour. Add water to form a dough.

  2. Roll out the paste.

  3. Place a layer around the edge of a pie dish.

  4. Cover 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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Shin of beef
Slow stewing breaks down connective tissue, leaving the meat tender and rich in flavour.
Onions
Sweetness and savoury depth as they soften and dissolve into the stewing liquid.
Turnip
Adds body and sweetness to the vegetables that are mashed into the filling.
Suet
Fat that makes the pie paste short and tender as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the structure of the suet paste dough.

The step that matters

Reduce the gravy slowly in an open pan. Boiling gently in an open pan evaporates water and concentrates the gravy so it thickens. If it is too thin, the filling will be watery and the pastry may turn soggy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, turnip, carrot, pepper, mushroom, flour):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, turnip, carrot, pepper, mushroom, flour. 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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