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Raised Pie

A pie made with boiled beef shin, ham, spices, and a flour crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Raised Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Boil the shin of beef in water until reduced by half.

  2. Add ham, peppercorns, cloves, mace, and salt to the stock.

Assemble and bake

  1. Prepare the crust with flour, laying it around the sides of the dish.

  2. Bake for 2 hours, topping with bacon or butter before covering with crust.

  3. Do not add liquid until after baking, if at all.

  4. Substitute hare for venison if preferred.

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. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Clove + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Beef + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,729 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Ham + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Shin of beef
Provides rich meaty flavour and gelatine-rich body as it simmers into the stock.
Flour
Forms the crust, which seals in moisture and shapes the pie.
Bacon or butter
Adds fat to the top, enriching flavour and helping the crust brown.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty depth to the stock.

The step that matters

Reducing the stock by half. Simmering the beef in water until reduced by half concentrates its flavour and gelatine, giving the filling body. Reducing too little leaves a thin, watery filling, while the crust and pie depend on that concentrated stock.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, ham, clove, flour, butter. 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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