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Meat Pies

A savory pie filled with meat, raisins, currants, sweet forcemeat balls, and various candied fruits, finished with a wine and egg yolk glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Meat Pies

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 pie

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

  2. Make a puff-paste crust and lay it in a pie dish.

  3. Fill the crust with your choice of meat, then add stoned raisins, washed currants, and sugar.

  4. Top with sweet forcemeat-balls and, if it's summer, add boiled artichoke bottoms; if winter, use scalded grapes.

  5. Add boiled and cut Spanish potatoes, candied citron, candied orange, lemon-peel, and mace.

  6. Dot the top with butter, close the pie, and bake until golden.

Make the wine sauce and finish

  1. While baking, mix the egg yolks with wine in a saucepan over low heat until thick.

  2. Remove from heat, sweeten with sugar, and add lemon juice.

  3. Once the pie is done, raise the lid and pour the hot mixture inside, then close it again and serve.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Artichoke + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together636 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Artichoke + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together80 recipes

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

  4. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  5. Potato + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together537 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the wine mixture into a custard-like sauce that sets as it cools.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the top crust brown golden in the oven.
Stoned raisins
Add sweetness and chewy moisture to the meat filling.
Currants
Add small bursts of sweetness and moisture to the filling.
Spanish potatoes
Add body and starch to the filling, absorbing savoury juices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet wine sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the hot egg-wine mixture. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but scramble if overheated. Keep the mixture over low heat and stir constantly until thick, then add it hot into the baked pie so it sets smoothly rather than curdling.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, raisin, sugar, artichoke, potato, orange, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Cranberryfits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, raisin, sugar, artichoke, potato, orange, lemon. 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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