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Russian Fish Pie

A pie with pastry crust, rice, flaked fish, hard‑boiled egg slices, and a thick white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Russian Fish 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 pastry

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

  2. In a bowl, rub the vegetable lard into the self-raising flour.

  3. Add the well-beaten egg and mix to form a paste.

  4. Roll out the paste and lay it in a greased pie dish.

Fill and bake

  1. Layer cooked rice, flaked fish, and slices of hard-boiled egg on the paste.

  2. Season with cayenne pepper, coarse sea salt, and nutmeg or mace.

  3. Moisten with thick white sauce flavored with lemon juice.

  4. Cover with pastry, pinching the edges to seal.

  5. Bake in the preheated oven for 15 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Rice + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Vegetable lard
Rubbed into the flour to make the pastry short and tender by coating flour particles with fat.
Self-raising flour
Forms the structure of the pastry, and its raising agent lets it rise slightly in the oven.
Egg
Binds the pastry dough into a paste and adds richness and structure.
Cooked fish
Forms the main filling, supplying the savory flavor of the pie.
Thick white sauce
Moistens the filling so it does not dry out during baking.

“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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