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Raised Beefsteak Fie

A savory pie of beefsteak and oysters in puff pastry, served with a veal broth and ketchup sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Raised Beefsteak Fie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Remove the skin from the fat of the beef steaks and beat them with a chopper.

  2. Cut the steaks into medium-sized pieces and sauté them in fresh butter with pepper, coarse sea salt, lemon juice, and chopped shallots until half cooked.

  3. Let the mixture cool in a dish.

Assemble and bake

  1. Blanch the oysters, strain them, and reserve the liquor.

  2. In a pie crust, layer the steak and oysters alternately, then cover with more pastry.

  3. Bake until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with a sauce made from veal broth, oyster liquor, ketchup, and any additional seasonings.

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. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

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

  4. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  5. Beef + vealtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rump of beef steaks
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender as it cooks partly in butter before baking.
Oysters
Add a briny, savoury flavour, and their liquor is reserved to enrich the sauce.
Puff pastry
Forms a crisp, golden, flaky crust that encloses the filling.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and helps brown the steak during sautéing.
Veal broth
Forms the base of the sauce, adding body and savoury depth.

The step that matters

Sautéing the steak until half cooked. Stopping at half cooked matters because the meat cooks further in the oven; overcooking it first leaves it dry and tough by the time the pie is baked.

“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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