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Chestnut Pie

Chestnut pie made with boiled chestnuts, celery, onion, butter, and wheatmeal pastry, baked and served with brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Chestnut Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the chestnuts until partly tender, then remove the skins.

  2. Cut the celery into pieces, discarding the very hard outer pieces.

  3. Slice the onion and stew it in 1 pint of water until tender.

Make the filling and pastry

  1. Mix the chestnuts, celery, onion, 1 oz of butter, and season with pepper and salt.

  2. Make pastry using the wheatmeal, 3 oz of butter, and a little cold water.

Bake and serve

  1. Turn the vegetable mixture into a pie dish, cover with the pastry, and bake for 30 minutes.

  2. Serve with brown gravy.

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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  2. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Chestnut + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Chestnut + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together696 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chestnuts
Form the bulk of the filling and give it a soft, starchy texture.
Allinson fine wheatmeal
Forms the pastry that encloses and holds the filling together.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the filling and the pastry, tenderising the crust.
Spanish onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma as it softens during stewing.
Celery
Adds moisture and a fresh, crisp savoury flavour to the filling.

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, onion, butter, pepper):

  1. Black-eyed peafits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Sesamefits about as well
  4. Chestnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, onion, butter, pepper. 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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