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Sea Pie

Sea Pie is a meat stew topped with 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

Make the stew

  1. Combine the meat and enough water to cover it in a saucepan.

  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.

  4. Meanwhile, make a suet crust by mixing the suet and flour, then roll it out to fit the saucepan, about 1 inch thick.

  5. After 2 hours, skim off the fat from the gravy and adjust the seasoning if necessary.

Cook and serve

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

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

  3. Once done, cut the crust into pieces, place them around a dish, and pour the meat and gravy in the center to serve.

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
Lean mutton, beef, or veal provides the savoury body of the stew as it slowly tenderises.
Suet
Melting suet enriches the crust with fat, making it tender and moist as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Flour forms the structure of the suet crust, holding it together while it steams over the stew.
Onions
Onions release sweetness and savoury depth into the gravy as they cook slowly.

The step that matters

Skim the fat before adding the crust. Fat rises and pools on the surface of a slow stew. Removing it leaves a cleaner, less greasy gravy and keeps the suet crust from sitting in excess oil.

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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