Name: Beefsteak Pie
Ingredients: 1 lb beefsteak; ½ teaspoon salt; ½ teaspoon pepper; 1 sheep’s kidney; 2 teaspoons flour; ½ cup water

Why it works: Pepper and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,459 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Beefsteak Pie

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 filling

Cut the beef into slices, about 2 inches long and 1 inch wide, and the fat into small pieces.
Mix the flour, pepper, and salt together.
Dip each slice of beef into the flour mixture and roll it up with a piece of fat inside.
Lay the rolled beef slices lightly in a pie dish.
Cut the kidney free from skin and fat, then chop it into small pieces.
Place the kidney pieces in the dish alternately with the beef.
Pour in the water.

Bake

Cover with rough puff pastry and bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 1 hour.

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.

Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50,459 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Beefsteak: Provides the meat that becomes tender during the long bake, forming the main body of the filling.
Sheep's kidney: Adds a rich, deeper meaty flavour to the filling.
Flour: Coats the beef slices and helps thicken the juices into a light gravy.

“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.