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Fresh Pork Pot-pie

A pot pie made with boiled pork, seasoned with salt and pepper, topped with a light dough crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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

Prepare the pork

  1. Remove all fat from the spare-rib and crack the bones.

  2. Boil the spare-rib until tender, skimming off any scum that rises.

  3. Season the meat with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

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

Make the crust

  1. Prepare the crust by mixing a small amount of butter into flour to make a light dough.

  2. Roll out the dough thinly and cut it into small square cakes.

  3. Place the cakes on a board until they are very light.

Assemble and cook

  1. Transfer the meat and most of the gravy to another kettle, leaving enough gravy to cover the pot half an inch above the rim.

  2. Cover the pot tightly and boil steadily for forty-five 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. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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

Spare-rib of pork
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long boiling.
Flour
Thickens the gravy and forms the light dough for the crust.
Butter
Mixed into the flour to give the crust richness and a tender texture.

The step that matters

Cover the pot tightly and boil steadily. If steam escapes, the cooking liquid reduces and the pot loses the moist heat needed to cook the crust and meat evenly. Keeping the lid sealed holds the temperature and moisture steady.

“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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