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Beef Steak Pie

A savory pie made with beef steak, vegetables, and a thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Steak Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Trim excess fat from the beef steak and cut it into thin chops.

  2. In a frying pan, cook the chops with fat trimmings until pale brown; do not fully cook.

  3. Remove the chops and place them in a stew pot.

  4. Dice the carrots and turnips, and slice the onions; add pepper and coarse sea salt.

  5. Fry the vegetables in the same fat until pale brown, then add to the stew pot with the chops, Mushroom Ketchup, and Yorkshire Relish.

Cook and chill

  1. Cover with warm water and simmer in the oven until the vegetables are soft.

  2. Remove from the oven and let cool overnight.

Finish

  1. The next day, remove all fat and simmer for about an hour.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of flour to thicken before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef steak
Provides the meat that becomes tender and rich during long, slow simmering.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a thicker, spoonable gravy.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stew as they soften during simmering.
Onions
Add savoury depth and sweetness as they brown and soften in the fat.

The step that matters

Fry the vegetables until pale brown, then remove all fat the next day. Browning builds savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction, but frying too hard can make the vegetables bitter. Chilling overnight lets fat solidify on the surface so it can be removed cleanly, keeping the finished gravy from tasting greasy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, pepper, mushroom, ketchup, 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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