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Cottage Pie

A savory pie made with minced meat, bread, stock, boiled potatoes, and bacon or butter topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Cottage Pie

Ingredients

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.

Make the base

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a pie dish, place the slice of bread.

  3. Add pepper, salt, shallot, nutmeg, lemon rind, parsley, thyme, and stock.

  4. Cook these ingredients in the oven for about 1 hour.

Assemble

  1. Thoroughly mix in the minced meat and add more stock if necessary.

  2. Cover with the boiled potatoes, seasoned with pepper and salt.

  3. Top with strips of bacon or pieces of butter.

Bake

  1. Bake the pie for 1.5 hours.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Minced meat
Forms the main savory body of the filling as it cooks through.
Stock
Supplies moisture that keeps the filling from drying out during baking.
Bread
Soaks up stock and helps thicken the base of the filling.
Boiled potatoes
Forms a soft topping that browns on the surface in the oven.
Bacon fat or butter
Adds richness and helps the potato topping brown.
Shallot
Adds a mild, sweet aroma as it cooks into the filling.

The step that matters

Keep the filling moist. Long baking drives moisture out of meat and bread. Adding stock when the mixture looks dry helps keep the filling juicy rather than tough and crumbly.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, bread, pepper, shallot, lemon, parsley, thyme):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, bread, pepper, shallot, lemon, parsley, thyme. 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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