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Mutton Pie Plain

A baked pie filled with cold sliced mutton, seasoned with salt and pepper, thickened with flour, and topped with pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Mutton and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,442 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mutton Pie Plain

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.

Prepare

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

  2. Place the cold mutton slices in a pudding dish and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Mix 2 tablespoons of flour with cold water to form a paste.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour 1 pint of boiling water over the meat and season again.

  2. Cover the meat with the prepared pie crust.

  3. Bake for one hour.

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. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mutton + flourtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Forms the meat filling, which becomes tender as it cooks under the crust.
Flour
Forms a paste with cold water that can thicken the cooking liquid.
Pie crust
Encloses the meat, trapping steam and moisture as it bakes.
Boiling water
Adds moisture and creates cooking liquid around the meat.

“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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