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Sea Pie

A stew of steak, onions, carrot, turnip, celery, potatoes, and suet topped with a pastry crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Sea Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the steak into pieces.

  2. Chop the onions, carrot, suet, turnip, celery, and potatoes into small pieces.

  3. Mix the meat and vegetables together and season to taste.

Make the stew

  1. Place in a stewpan and cover with water or stock.

  2. Simmer over gentle heat.

Make the crust and cook

  1. Make a stiff paste with flour, baking powder, chopped suet, and water.

  2. Roll out the paste to the size of the saucepan.

  3. Place the paste over the meat and simmer until the meat is cooked, about two hours.

  4. Carefully remove the crust.

Serve

  1. Place the meat and vegetables on a hot dish.

  2. Arrange the pie crust cut into neat pieces around them.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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 long, gentle simmering.
Suet
Adds fat and richness to the stew and forms the crust's tender, flaky texture.
Flour
Forms the structure of the stiff paste that becomes the crust.
Baking powder
Helps the paste rise and lighten as it cooks.
Potatoes
Thicken the stew slightly as they break down and add body.

The step that matters

Simmering the crust over the meat. The paste is cooked by gentle simmering rather than dry heat, so the heat must stay low and steady. A hard boil can toughen the meat and make the crust soggy or uneven.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, potato, flour):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, potato, flour. 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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