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Meat Pies and Puddings

A baked beef pie with mushrooms, eggs, and stock, topped with pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and chicken are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,172 recipes. Both carry 1-butyl acetate, which smells fruity, banana. The science ↓

Meat Pies and Puddings

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

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

Assemble the pie

  1. Layer the bottom of a pie dish with fillets of beef.

  2. Add chopped mushrooms, pepper, salt, and slices of hard-boiled egg.

  3. Pour in enough white stock or chicken consomme to fill the dish.

  4. Cover with pastry and seal the edges.

Bake

  1. Bake until the pastry 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.

  1. Mushroom + chickentop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  2. Beef + chickentop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,148 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Mushroom + beeftop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fillets of beef
Provide the main meat filling that becomes tender during baking.
Chopped mushrooms
Add moisture and savory, earthy flavor to the filling.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds richness and a firm, sliced texture to the filling.
White stock or chicken consomme
Supplies liquid that moistens the filling and builds savory flavor.
Pastry
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form a crisp crust.

The step that matters

Seal the pastry edges. A tight seal keeps steam and juices inside the pie so the filling cooks in its own liquid instead of leaking out and drying.

“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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