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Vegetable Pie

A savory pie with tomatoes, turnips, carrots, potatoes, sago, herbs, eggs, and butter, baked in a wholemeal crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable 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 and stew

  1. Prepare the vegetables. Scald and skin the tomatoes, then cut them into pieces no larger than a walnut.

  2. In a pan, stew the tomatoes in the butter and 1 pint of water until nearly tender.

  3. Add pepper, salt, and mixed herbs to the pan.

Assemble

  1. Pour the cooked vegetables into a pie dish, sprinkle in the sago, and add water to create gravy if needed.

  2. Cut the hard-boiled eggs into quarters and place them on top of the vegetables.

Bake

  1. Cover with a crust made from wholemeal flour and bake at 400°F (200°C) until 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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Tomato + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 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

Tomatoes
Break down when stewed to form a moist, soft base with a tangy flavor.
Potatoes
Starch softens during cooking and gives the filling a hearty, body-rich texture.
Sago
Starch thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy as it heats with the vegetables.
Hard-boiled eggs
Cooked egg whites and yolks add firm, set texture and richness to the filling.
Butter
Fat carries flavor and adds richness when the tomatoes are stewed.

The step that matters

Thickening the gravy with sago. Sago is a starch that only thickens when it is hydrated and heated with enough liquid. If there is too little liquid around it, the gravy stays thin or the sago stays grainy, so check the filling has enough moisture before baking.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, carrot, potato, egg, butter, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, carrot, potato, egg, 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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