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Cheshire Pork Pie

A pork pie with apples, seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, sage, and sugar, baked in a pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 642 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cheshire Pork Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Remove the skin from the pork and season it with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and dried sage.

  2. In a dish, layer the pork and apple alternately until the dish is full.

Assemble and bake

  1. Sprinkle the sugar over the meat and pour the water on top.

  2. Cover with a pie crust and decorate as desired.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1.5 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. Nutmeg + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together642 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Sage + appletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

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

  5. Pork + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,527 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pork
Provides the meat and fat that make up the filling and keep it moist as it cooks.
Apples
Add tartness and moisture that balance the savoury pork.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and forms the golden, structured top and sides of the pie.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface of the pie brown during baking.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper, nutmeg, sage, sugar):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, nutmeg, sage, sugar. 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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