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Sea Pie

Sea Pie is a savory pie made with flour, suet, vegetables, onions, and meat, baked or steamed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and meat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,364 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Sea Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make the paste with the flour and suet or dripping.

  2. Prepare and cook the vegetables and onions as you would for a stew until tender.

Assemble and cook

  1. Add the meat to the cooked vegetables.

  2. Cover the mixture with a light paste.

  3. Boil or steam for 20 minutes.

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. Onion + meattop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 recipes

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

  2. Flour + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + meattop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,529 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

Flour
Forms the paste that encloses the filling and gives the crust its structure.
Suet or dripping
Adds fat to the paste, making it rich and tender as it cooks.
Meat
Provides the main savory filling that is cooked within the stew mixture.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, meat):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, meat. 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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