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Beefsteak Pie

A pie made with thinly sliced steak rolled with fat, covered in pastry crust, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Beefsteak Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Cut the steak into thin slices, about 2 inches long and 1 inch wide.

  2. Mix flour, salt, and pepper together and dip the meat in the mixture.

  3. Roll up the meat and place a small piece of fat in each roll.

  4. Place the rolls in a pint pie dish and fill the dish with water until just over half full.

Make and add the crust

  1. Mix flour and shortening to make a flaky crust and roll the crust out to about ½ inch thick.

  2. Wet the edges of the dish and lay strips of pastry on the wet edges.

  3. Turn the freshly cut edge of the pastry outwards and wet the pastry strips.

  4. Cover the pie with the remaining pastry, avoiding tight stretching.

  5. Trim the edges and decorate the pie.

Bake

  1. Brush the pie with a beaten egg and make a hole in the pastry for steam to escape.

  2. Bake for 1 hour in a hot oven, then reduce to moderate heat.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender as it cooks slowly in the filling.
Flour
Thickens the juices and gives the crust its structure as it bakes.
Butter, lard, or dripping
Adds richness and flakiness to the crust and fat to the meat rolls.

The step that matters

Avoid tight stretching when covering the pie. Pastry stretched tight shrinks back and can tear or pull away during baking, while gently laid pastry stays intact and seals the edges.

“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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