Name: Meat and Potato Pie
Ingredients: 1 lb meat; 2 cups potatoes

Why it works: Meat and potato work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 786 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Meat and Potato Pie

Ingredients

1 lb meat
2 cups potatoes

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
Prepare the meat by cutting it into small pieces.
Peel and slice the potatoes.

Assemble and bake

Layer the meat and potatoes in a pie dish.
Cover with a pastry crust and seal the edges.
Bake for 30-40 minutes until the crust is 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.

Meat + potatotop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together786 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Meat: Provides the savory filling and protein bulk of the pie.
Potatoes: Adds starchy body to the filling and helps it hold together when sliced and layered.
Pastry crust (in the method): Encloses the filling and browns in the oven for a golden finish.

“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.