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Sea Pie

Sea Pie is a stew of stewing beef and onions covered with a suet crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sea Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Beat the meat with a rolling pin and cut it into slices.

  2. Peel and slice the onions.

  3. Heat the dripping in a saucepan; when hot, add the onions and fry until brown.

Make the stew

  1. Sprinkle 2 teaspoons of flour over the onions and gradually stir in the cold water until it boils.

  2. Add seasoning and meat, then reduce heat and cook slowly.

Make the crust and finish

  1. For the suet crust, shred and chop the suet, mix it with the flour and a pinch of salt.

  2. Make a paste with cold water and roll it out on a floured board into a thick round cake, the size of the saucepan lid.

  3. Place the paste into the stew and simmer all together for about 2 hours.

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. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Stewing beef
Provides the substance of the stew, becoming tender during slow cooking.
Onions
Soften and turn sweet and brown when fried, adding depth of flavour to the stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid and forms the structure of the suet crust.
Suet
Adds fat to the crust, keeping it rich and tender as it cooks.
Dripping
Fat for frying the onions, carrying flavour and helping them brown.

The step that matters

Cooking the stew slowly with the crust. Once the paste is placed in the stew, it must simmer gently rather than boil hard. Vigorous boiling can break up the crust and toughen the meat, while slow simmering keeps the crust intact and lets the beef become tender.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, flour):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, flour. 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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