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Vegetable Pie

A pie filled with a stew of broad beans, carrots, turnips, artichoke bottoms, mushrooms, peas, onions, lettuce, parsley, and celery in veal gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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

  1. Scald and blanch the broad beans.

  2. Cut the carrots, turnips, artichoke bottoms, mushrooms, peas, onions, lettuce, parsley, and celery.

  3. Combine all the vegetables in a pot.

  4. Make a nice stew with the veal gravy.

Assemble and bake

  1. Prepare a pie crust and line the edge of a baking dish.

  2. Place a cup upside down in the center to prevent the crust from sinking.

  3. Bake the pie until golden brown.

  4. Remove from the oven.

  5. Open the lid.

  6. Pour in the vegetable stew.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Pie crust
Forms the golden, structural shell that holds the filling in the baking dish.
Veal gravy
Binds the vegetables into a stew and adds savoury moisture and body.
Broad beans
Provide starchy bulk and texture to the filling.
Artichoke bottoms
Add tender body and a mild, earthy flavour to the filling.

The step that matters

Placing the cup upside down in the center. The cup holds up the crust's center so it does not sink into the hot filling while baking. Without support, the pastry can slump and become soggy and uneven.

Swap the onion

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

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

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