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Vegetable Pie

A baked pie filled with stewed peas, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, and tapioca.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Vegetable 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

  1. Stew the peas, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, and tapioca in a small amount of water until nearly cooked.

  2. Cut the vegetables into small pieces.

Assemble and bake

  1. Fill a pie dish with the cut vegetables.

  2. Cover the filling with a pie crust and bake at 400°F (200°C) until the crust is golden brown.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Tapioca
Thickens the cooking liquid as it heats, giving the filling a body that holds together.
Flour
Adds a little more thickening so the juices become less watery in the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, which carries flavour and gives a softer mouthfeel.
Pie crust
Forms the structure that encloses the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Stew the vegetables until nearly cooked. The vegetables finish cooking in the oven, so stewing them only partly helps them soften evenly without turning mushy. Cooking them fully first would overcook them by the time the crust browns.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, turnip, celery, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, turnip, celery, butter, flour, pepper. 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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