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English Giblet Pie

A savory pie filled with stewed giblets in a butter‑flour gravy, topped with crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour 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 ↓

English Giblet 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 the filling

  1. Wash and clean the giblets.

  2. Place them in a stew pan and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Add 2 tablespoons of butter rolled in 2 tablespoons of flour and cover with water.

  4. Stew until the giblets are very tender.

  5. If the gravy is too thin, add more butter rolled in flour. Let it boil once.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line the sides of a pie dish with pie crust.

  2. Add the giblets to the dish.

  3. Pour in the gravy.

  4. Cover with the top crust, leaving a square opening in the center.

  5. Decorate the opening with leaves of the crust.

  6. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until the crust is done.

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. Butter + flourtop 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).

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

Giblets
Form the main body of the filling and become tender through slow stewing.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the gravy, giving it a smoother mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form the structure of the pie.

The step that matters

Thickening the gravy. Flour rolled into butter must cook in the liquid long enough to swell and thicken it. If the gravy is too thin, adding more butter rolled in flour and letting it boil once helps it set properly.

“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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