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Chine Pie

A savory pie made with pig backbone, pepper, coarse sea salt, flour, water, and pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,459 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chine Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Cut the backbone into small pieces.

  2. Stew the pieces until tender.

  3. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  4. Thicken the gravy with flour and water.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line the sides of a baking pan with pie crust.

  2. Add the mixture to the pan and cover with more pie crust.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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

Backbone
Provides the meat and collagen that become tender and flavorful during slow stewing.
Flour
Thickens the stewing liquid into a gravy that holds the filling together.
Pie crust
Forms the enclosing pastry that holds the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Stew the pieces until tender. Backbone meat has tough connective tissue that needs long, gentle moist heat to break down into gelatin. Stopping early leaves the meat chewy, and the gravy will not thicken as well without that gelatin.

“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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