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Roman Pie

A savory pie with cooked meat, bacon, macaroni, and a milk-based sauce, baked in pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Roman Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Remove all fat from the cooked meat and cut it into small pieces.

  2. Chop the bacon coarsely and cut the macaroni into thick rings.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the milk, onion, lemon peel, and mace; bring to a boil, then simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  2. In another pan, cook the butter and flour together for a few minutes without browning.

  3. Add the milk mixture to the butter and flour, stirring quickly until smooth and thick; season with salt and pepper.

  4. Strain the sauce into a basin and mix in the meat, bacon, and macaroni.

Assemble and bake

  1. Butter a suitable tin mold and coat it with finely broken vermicelli; line it with light pastry.

  2. Fill the mold with the meat mixture and cover with another layer of pastry.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until the pastry is thoroughly cooked.

  4. Turn the pie out onto a hot dish and serve with tomato sauce.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Cooked meat
Forms the bulk of the filling and supplies the main savoury flavour.
Butter and flour
Cooked together they form a roux that thickens the milk into a smooth sauce.
Milk
Forms the base of the sauce, which binds the filling together and keeps it moist.
Macaroni
Adds bulk and chewy texture to the filling once it is set in the sauce.
Fat bacon
Adds savoury richness and fat that flavours the meat and sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the butter and flour without browning. Cooking the roux only briefly, without browning, keeps the flour's thickening power and a neutral flavour. Stirring the milk in quickly keeps the sauce smooth rather than lumpy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, milk, onion, lemon, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, milk, onion, lemon, butter, flour, pepper. 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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