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Vegetable Pie

A pie filled with a stew of beans, carrots, turnips, mushrooms, onions, lettuces, parsley, celery, and peas, seasoned with veal gravy, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and artichoke match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 140 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Scald and blanch the broad beans.

  2. Cut the young carrots, turnips, artichoke bottoms, mushrooms, onions, lettuces, parsley, and celery.

  3. Add peas.

  4. Make a stew with the vegetables and a little good veal gravy.

  5. Season the stew with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake a pie crust over a dish.

  2. Line the edge of the dish with extra crust.

  3. Once baked, pour the stew into the dish.

  4. Lay the crust over the stew.

  5. Stir in a cup of cream before serving.

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. Turnip + artichoketop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together140 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Artichoke + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together101 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Broad beans
Add body and a tender, fresh texture to the filling.
Veal gravy
Adds savory depth and moisture that binds the vegetables into a stew.
Pie crust
Forms the structural case that holds the stew and browns in the oven.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the stew.

The step that matters

Pour the stew into the baked crust. The crust is baked before filling, so the stew should be hot and not too wet. Excess liquid can soften the crust and make the pie soggy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, carrot, turnip, artichoke, mushroom, lettuce, parsley):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, carrot, turnip, artichoke, mushroom, lettuce, parsley. 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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