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Sea Pie

Sea Pie is a savory pie of mutton chops, apples, onions, and suet crust, finished with a mushroom ketchup gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Sea 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

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

Assemble and bake

  1. In a deep pie dish, layer the mutton chops, followed by the sliced apples and onions.

  2. Sprinkle with herbs, salt, pepper, and sugar.

  3. Cover the pie with suet crust and bake for 1 hour.

Finish the gravy

  1. After baking, pour the gravy out from the side, cool it, skim off the fat, add the mushroom ketchup, and return it to the pie.

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. Ketchup + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Mutton + mushroomtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together685 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

Neck mutton
Provides the meat and rich juices that form the gravy in the pie.
Onions
Add savoury depth and sweetness as they soften during baking.
Apples
Add tart flavour and sweetness that balance the rich meat.
Suet crust
Forms a rich, tender pastry lid that seals in moisture and steams the filling.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds concentrated savoury, umami flavour to the finished gravy.

The step that matters

Skimming the gravy after baking. Mutton and suet release a lot of fat during baking. Cooling the gravy lets the fat rise and solidify so it can be skimmed off, leaving a cleaner, less greasy sauce before the mushroom ketchup is added and the gravy returned to the pie.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, mutton, mushroom, ketchup, pepper, sugar):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Red currantfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, mutton, mushroom, ketchup, pepper, sugar. 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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