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Malina Pie

A savory pie made with minced mutton or veal, lemon, onions, and spices, baked in pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Malina 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. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, combine the minced meat, egg yolks, lemon juice, lemon rind, chopped onions, grated nutmeg, mushroom catsup, cayenne, and salt. Mix well and fold in the butter pieces.

Bake and serve

  1. Line a baking dish with pastry and pour the mixture into it.

  2. Bake until golden brown.

  3. Serve with gravy made from the bones of the cold meats.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cold mutton or veal
Forms the bulk of the pie and gives its savoury, meaty flavour.
Egg yolks
Bind the minced meat and help the filling set as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, keeping the filling tender as it cooks.
Onions
Add aromatic sweetness and depth of flavour to the filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich meat and butter.

The step that matters

Fold in the butter gently. Butter pieces left whole in the mixture melt during baking and leave pockets of richness, giving a moister, more tender filling. Overworking the mixture can make it dense and greasy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, egg, lemon, nutmeg, mushroom, pepper, butter):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, egg, lemon, nutmeg, mushroom, pepper, butter. 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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