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Fresh Pork Pot-pie

A pork pot pie with a butter crust, thickened gravy, and tender sparerib meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fresh Pork Pot-pie

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the pork

  1. Boil the sparerib until tender, removing scum as it rises.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Thicken the gravy with a little flour half an hour before serving.

  4. Remove bones and most of the gravy, leaving enough to cover the pot half an inch above the rim.

Make the crust

  1. Prepare the crust by mixing a small bit of butter into a light dough.

  2. Roll out the dough thin and cut into small squares.

  3. Place the squares on a board until very light.

Finish the pot pie

  1. Cover the pot tightly and boil steadily for 45 minutes, ensuring no steam escapes.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Flour and butter 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

Sparerib
Provides the meat and rich flavour that the gravy is built from.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the crust and meat rather than running thin.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the light dough that forms the crust.

The step that matters

Cover the pot tightly and boil steadily. If steam escapes, the liquid reduces and the pot can dry out or boil unevenly. A tight lid keeps the steam trapped so the crust cooks through in the moist heat.

“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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