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Vegetable Pie

A baked pie filled with boiled vegetables and a sago gravy, topped with short crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Vegetable Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderately hot oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the onion and fry it in butter until soft.

  2. Boil all the vegetables in ½ pint of water until tender.

Assemble and bake

  1. Combine the cooked vegetables in a pie dish, adding salt and pepper to taste.

  2. Add enough water for gravy and sprinkle in the sago.

  3. Cover with short crust and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  5. Celery + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 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

Potato
Starchy body that holds the filling together and thickens it as it cooks.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and bulk, and keeps its shape through boiling.
Sago
Starch that thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the flavour of the softened onion.

The step that matters

Adding the sago with the gravy water. Sago is a starch that thickens when heated in liquid. Sprinkled in without enough water to disperse it, it can clump, and the gravy will not thicken evenly in the oven.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, carrot, turnip, 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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