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Salt Fish Pie

A baked pie with salted fish, hard‑boiled eggs, onions, and a sauce of mustard, anchovy essence, mushroom ketchup, and water, topped with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Anchovy and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 479 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Salt Fish 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 the fish

  1. Soak the salt fish in cold water overnight.

  2. Boil the fish until cooked, then remove bones and skin.

  3. Let the fish cool on a fish drainer.

  4. Slice the hard-boiled eggs and onion very thin.

Assemble the pie

  1. Line the bottom of a pie dish with fish forcemeat or sliced potatoes.

  2. Layer with onions, fish, and eggs, seasoning each layer with pepper.

  3. Mix mustard, Essence of Anchovy, Mushroom Ketchup, and water; pour over the layers.

  4. Dot the top with pieces of fresh butter.

  5. Cover with puff pastry and bake at 400°F (200°C) for one 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.

  1. Anchovy + ketchuptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  4. Fish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together637 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Thick salt fish
Provides the main savory fish flavor and the bulk of the filling.
4 hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a firm, sliceable texture to the layers.
Puff pastry
Forms a crisp, golden, flaky crust that seals the pie.
Fresh butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the top brown as it bakes.
Mushroom ketchup
Contributes concentrated savory, umami depth to the filling liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking and cooling the salt fish. Salt fish must be soaked long enough to remove excess salt and then fully cooked; under-soaking leaves the filling overly salty, while cooling it before layering keeps the pastry from becoming soggy.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, egg, onion, pepper, anchovy, mushroom, ketchup):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, egg, onion, pepper, anchovy, mushroom, ketchup. 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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