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Shropshire Pie

A pastry pie filled with rabbit, fat pork, forcemeat balls, nutmeg, and white wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and pork work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 832 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Shropshire Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Line a dish with good puff pastry.

  2. Chop together the rabbit and fat pork.

  3. Season the mixture with coarse sea salt and black pepper, then layer it in the dish.

  4. Make some good forcemeat balls and add them to the dish.

  5. Sprinkle in a pinch of nutmeg and pour in the white wine.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) for 1 hour.

  2. Serve hot or cold.

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. Rabbit + porktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together832 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  3. Rabbit + white winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together132 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + white winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,433 recipes

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

  5. Rabbit + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together235 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

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

What each ingredient does

Puff pastry
Forms the flaky crust that encloses the filling and browns in the oven.
Rabbit
Provides the main meat, whose lean texture sets firmly as the pie bakes.
Fat pork
Adds fat that keeps the meat moist and carries flavour through the filling.
White wine
Adds acidity and moisture that helps flavour the filling as it cooks.

The step that matters

Season the mixture with coarse sea salt and black pepper, then layer it in the dish.. Salt is spread through the chopped meat and fat before baking, so it seasons the filling evenly rather than only on the surface.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, pork, pepper, white wine):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pork, pepper, white wine. 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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