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Sea Pie

Sea Pie is a stew of mutton, beef, or veal with onions, carrot, turnip, and a suet crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sea Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stew

  1. In a saucepan, combine the meat and enough water to cover it.

  2. Add the chopped onions, carrot, turnip, salt, and pepper.

  3. Pour in 1½ pints of water and let it stew slowly for 2 hours.

Make the suet crust

  1. Meanwhile, make a suet crust by mixing the suet and flour.

  2. Roll out the crust to fit the saucepan, about 1 inch thick.

Finish and serve

  1. After 2 hours, skim off the fat from the gravy and adjust seasoning if needed.

  2. Cover the meat with the suet crust, ensuring it fits closely.

  3. Cover the saucepan and cook slowly for another hour.

  4. When done, cut the crust into pieces and serve with meat and gravy in the center.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Provides the main body of the stew and flavors the gravy as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that makes the crust rich and tender as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the suet crust so it holds its shape when cut.
Onions
Soften during stewing and add sweetness and depth to the gravy.

The step that matters

Covering the meat with the suet crust. The crust must fit closely over the saucepan so steam stays trapped and the crust cooks through in the stew rather than drying out or leaving gaps.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, carrot, turnip, pepper, 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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