Name: A Beef Steak Pie
Ingredients: 5 or 6 rump steaks; coarse sea salt; black pepper; puff pastry; water; butter

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

A Beef Steak 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.

Prepare

Beat the steaks well with a rolling pin.
Season the steaks with salt and pepper.

Assemble

Line a dish with puff pastry and add a little water to the bottom.
Place the seasoned steaks in the dish, adding a lump of butter on each steak.
Cover with a lid of puff pastry, cutting a decorative shape on top.

Bake

Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 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 + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rump steaks: Provide the main meat, which becomes tender and juicy during the long, covered bake.
Puff pastry: Forms a crisp, flaky crust that browns in the oven and encloses the filling.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture, melting over the steaks to baste them as they cook.

“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.