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Vegetable Pie

A pie of stewed tomatoes, turnips, carrots, potatoes, and eggs, topped with a wholemeal crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

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. Prepare the vegetables: scald and skin the tomatoes, then cut them into pieces no larger than a walnut.

Make the filling

  1. In a pot, stew the tomatoes in the butter and 2 cups of water until nearly tender.

  2. Add pepper, salt, and mixed herbs to the pot.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the cooked vegetables into a pie dish, sprinkle in the sago, and add more water if necessary to create gravy.

  2. Cut the hard-boiled eggs into quarters and place them on top of the vegetables.

  3. Cover with a wholemeal crust and bake at 400°F (200°C) until 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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Tomato + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 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

Tomatoes
Break down into a moist, slightly acidic base that forms the body of the filling.
Potatoes
Their starch softens during stewing and bakes into a soft, filling body.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and a firm, tender texture after cooking.
Turnips
Add a firm, tender texture and a mildly sharp flavour to the filling.
Sago
Its starch thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy as the pie bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the stewed vegetables.

The step that matters

Thickening the gravy with sago. Sago is starch that must be hydrated and heated to thicken. If there is too little liquid or the pie is not baked long enough, the gravy stays thin or grainy. Adding water as needed keeps the sago able to gelatinise evenly.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, carrot, potato, egg, butter, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, carrot, potato, egg, butter, 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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