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Turbot or Brill Pie

A savory pie made with fish fillets, eggs, forcemeat balls, butter, and fish jelly, baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,488 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Turbot or Brill Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Rub the fish pieces with pepper, salt, and shredded herbs.

  2. Toss the fish in a pan with butter until three-quarters cooked, then let cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Prepare the pie crust in your dish.

  2. Layer the fish, chopped hard-boiled eggs, forcemeat balls, and pieces of butter in the crust.

  3. Pour in the fish jelly.

  4. Cover with a pie crust and bake for 30 minutes or longer, depending on size.

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. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Fish + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,948 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Fish + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,782 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish fillets
Form the main body of the filling, providing the pie's flaky, tender bulk.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a firm, sliceable texture to the filling.
Forcemeat balls
Contribute savoury richness and a dense, moist texture within the pie.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, moisture, and browning to the pie.
Fish jelly
Adds moisture and gives the filling a set, savoury body as it cools.

The step that matters

Partly cook the fish before assembling. Cooking the fish only to three-quarters done lets it finish gently in the oven without drying out. Fully cooking it first would leave it dry and tough after baking.

“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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