Skip to main content
Main

English Meat Pie

A savory pie filled with finely chopped cold meat, lemon, spices, eggs, and gravy or butter, topped with breadcrumbs and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

English Meat Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the filling

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Chop the cold meat very fine and place it in a mixing bowl.

  3. Add the lemon rind, lemon juice, nutmeg, red and black pepper, salt, dry mustard, onion, and parsley. Mix well.

  4. In a separate bowl, beat the raw eggs and combine with the gravy or melted butter. Stir into the meat mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Transfer the mixture to a pie dish and top with bread crumbs and small lumps of butter.

  2. Bake for about 30-40 minutes until golden brown.

  3. Garnish with hard-boiled eggs before serving.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold meat
Forms the bulk of the pie and gives it its savoury body.
Raw eggs
Bind the filling together and set as it bakes, holding its shape.
Bread crumbs
Add body to the filling and form a crisp, golden top when baked.
Gravy or melted butter
Adds moisture and richness so the filling does not dry out in the oven.
Butter
Melts over the top during baking, encouraging browning and richness.

The step that matters

Beating the eggs into the mixture. Raw egg must be fully combined so it sets evenly as the pie bakes. Unevenly mixed egg can leave pockets of loose, undercooked filling, while the gentle stir keeps the mixture from becoming tough or dense.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, lemon, nutmeg, pepper, mustard, parsley, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, lemon, nutmeg, pepper, mustard, parsley, 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes