Skip to main content
Main

Lancashire Raised Pie

A pie with a pastry crust filled with seasoned meat, suet, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pork and beef match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Lancashire Raised Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Cut the meat into thin slices and season with pepper and salt.

  2. Remove bones and stew them with 1 pint of water, ¼ teaspoon salt, and a pinch of pepper for 2 hours.

  3. Strain the gravy and let it cool until it becomes a stiff jelly.

Make the pastry

  1. Melt the shredded suet with ½ teaspoon salt in ½ pint of boiling water for 10-15 minutes.

  2. In a bowl, combine 1½ pounds of flour and pour in the boiling fat and water mixture. Mix thoroughly with a spoon.

  3. Knead into a stiff paste.

  4. Shape the paste into a cone. Flatten the sides. Smooth the top.

  5. Quickly place the cone in the oven while still warm.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the cone with the seasoned meat. Layer with minced fat. Press down firmly.

  2. Egg the edges. Roll out the cover and place it on top of the pie.

  3. Make a small hole in the center for adding gravy later.

  4. Decorate the pie with pastry leaves. Brush with egg yolk.

  5. Bake in a good oven.

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. Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Meat + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,208 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Meat + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,533 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Forms the savory filling, becoming tender during the long cooking of the pie.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the hot-water pastry moist and tender as it sets.
Flour
Forms the gluten-based structure of the pastry that holds the raised shape.
Egg yolk
Brushed on top to promote golden browning of the crust.

The step that matters

Shaping the cone while the pastry is still warm. Hot-water pastry stiffens as it cools and cracks if handled cold, so it must be shaped and placed in the oven quickly while still warm.

“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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes