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Bean and Bacon Pie

A layered pie of broad beans, bacon, parsley, pepper, parmesan, shallot, and gravy, topped with pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Bean and Bacon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the broad beans in salted water; if they are young, use them as they are; if old, remove the outer skins after boiling.

  2. Line a buttered pie dish with short pastry.

Layer and bake

  1. Place a layer of beans in the bottom, then sprinkle with chopped parsley, pepper, grated parmesan cheese, and a little chopped shallot.

  2. Cover this layer with thinly-cut bacon.

  3. Continue layering until the top of the dish is reached.

  4. Fill with gravy, cover with puff pastry, wash the top with beaten egg, and bake.

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. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  3. Beans + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together147 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Beans + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Butter + parmesan cheesetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Broad beans
Form the main filling and provide the bulk of the pie.
Thinly-cut bacon
Adds savoury, salty flavour and fat that rendering through the layers seasons the beans.
Grated parmesan cheese
Adds salty, savoury depth to the bean layers.
Gravy
Supplies moisture that fills the spaces between layers and keeps the filling from drying out.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, golden top crust that browns in the oven.
Butter
Greases the dish so the pastry releases cleanly and adds richness.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, pepper, parmesan cheese, shallot, egg):

  1. Walnutfits about as well
  2. Chickpeafits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, pepper, parmesan cheese, shallot, egg. 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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