Name: A Ham Pie
Ingredients: cold boiled ham, sliced ½ inch thick; pepper; 1 young fowl, picked, gutted, washed, and singed; salt; hard-boiled eggs, yolks only; pie crust; rich beef gravy

Why it works: Pepper and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

A Ham Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Make a thick pie crust and line the dish with it.
Layer the sliced ham in the crust and sprinkle with pepper.

Assemble

Season the fowl's belly with pepper and salt, and rub a little salt on the outside.
Place the fowl on top of the ham.
Add the hard-boiled yolks and cover with more ham, then sprinkle with pepper.
Cover with the pie crust and bake well.

Serve

When done, fill the pie with rich beef gravy and serve hot.

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 + beeftop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Ham + beeftop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,729 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
Ham + eggtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,526 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Ham + peppertop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6,058 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Egg + beeftop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,305 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

Pie crust: Forms the enclosing shell that holds the filling together while it bakes.
Cold boiled ham: Provides the main savoury meat layers and much of the pie's flavour.
Young fowl: Supplies the central cooked poultry meat and its juices to the filling.
Hard-boiled eggs: Adds richness and a creamy texture from the cooked yolks.
Rich beef gravy: Adds moisture and savoury depth when poured into the baked pie.

“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.