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Vegetable Pie

A savory pie filled with boiled vegetables and topped with puff pastry, served with a veal and ham gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and artichoke match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 140 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Half boil the vegetables in good broth for a short time.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the vegetables in a pie dish and cover with puff pastry.

  2. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C).

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Make gravy by boiling veal, ham, pepper, salt, bay leaf, mushrooms, shallots, parsley, and onion until thick.

  2. Strain the gravy, mix in cream if using, and pour into the pie before serving.

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. Turnip + artichoketop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together140 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Artichoke + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together70 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Artichoke + beanstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together154 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Puff paste
Forms a crisp, flaky top crust that browns in the oven and seals the filling.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the gravy.
Mushrooms
Contribute savory, earthy flavor to the gravy as they cook down.

The step that matters

Half boil the vegetables. Partly cooking the vegetables first softens them so they finish tender during baking, while avoiding mush. Boiling them fully would leave them overcooked and watery inside the crust.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, potato, artichoke, cauliflower, beans, onion):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, potato, artichoke, cauliflower, beans, onion. 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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