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Sea Pie

Sea Pie is a stew of steak, onion, and potatoes baked in pie paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sea Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. In a pot, combine the steak, onion, and potatoes.

  2. Season with salt and pepper, then cover with cold water.

  3. Stew for at least 1 hour.

Assemble and cook

  1. Place a layer of pie paste in the bottom of a pan, ensuring the water covers the paste.

  2. For a 'double decker', layer half the meat and vegetables on top of the paste and cover with a second crust, ensuring the water rises above this layer as well.

  3. Cover and cook for about 30 minutes.

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. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  2. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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

Steak
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during the long, moist stew.
Potatoes
Add starch that thickens the cooking liquid and gives the filling body.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma as it softens in the stew.
Pie paste with suet
Suet adds fat that makes the crust rich and tender.

The step that matters

Stewing the steak for at least 1 hour. Steak is tough collagen-rich meat, and it needs a long, moist simmer to break down into tender pieces. Cutting the stew short leaves the meat chewy in the finished pie.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, pepper. 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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