Name: Meat-pies and Puddings
Ingredients: 1 lb meat; ½ lb flour; lard or dripping; butter (for cold pie); coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Meat-pies and Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Make short pastry with lard or dripping for a hot pie, or use half lard and half butter for a cold pie.
Roll out the pastry to fit the pie dish, making it 1.5 inches larger than the dish and 0.5 to 0.75 inches thick.
Invert the empty dish on the rolled pastry and cut around it with a sharp knife, leaving a 0.25-inch border.
Cut a strip from the leftover pastry to fit around the rim of the pie dish, wet the rim, and press the strip onto it.
Roll out the remaining pastry to 0.5 inches thick and cut into shapes for decoration.

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.

Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,594 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Meat + flourtop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,529 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

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Meatballs37 recipes

Mince Meat37 recipes

Meat Cakes35 recipes

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Meat-pies and Puddings