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Baked Meat Pie

A pie filled with boiled lamb, veal, or poultry, seasoned with salt and pepper, topped with butter and baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lamb and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 623 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Baked Meat 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

  1. Boil the meat until tender.

  2. Line a deep dish with pie crust.

Assemble

  1. Place the meat in the dish and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Pour in the gravy from boiling the meat.

  3. Add a few lumps of butter on top.

  4. Cover with a thick upper crust, pierced with holes for steam to escape.

Bake

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until the crust is golden brown.

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. Lamb + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together623 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Meat + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,208 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Lamb + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb, veal, or poultry
Provides the savoury meat filling that becomes tender through long boiling.
Gravy from boiled meat
Adds moisture and meaty flavour so the filling does not dry out in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and helps the crust brown.
Pie crust (made with half as much shortening as for regular pies)
Forms the structure that encloses the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Piercing the upper crust. Steam builds up inside as the filling heats. Holes let it escape so the crust does not swell, split unevenly, or make the filling soggy.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, pepper, meat, butter, pork):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, pepper, meat, butter, pork. 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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