Skip to main content
Dessert

Bacon and Egg Pies

A small pie made with flour, lard, bacon, eggs, pepper, salt, and cold water, baked at 400°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bacon and Egg Pies

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the pastry

  1. In a bowl, combine flour and lard, rubbing them together until fine.

  2. Add cold water to form a stiff paste.

  3. Roll out the paste on a floured surface to ¼ inch thick.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line patty pans with the rolled paste.

  2. Fill each with cooked bacon and egg pieces, seasoning with pepper and salt.

  3. Wet the edges, cover with another layer of paste, and seal with a fork.

  4. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 10 minutes.

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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the structure of the paste once mixed with water.
Lard or dripping
Rubbed into the flour to add fat, making the pastry short and tender.
Eggs
Set when baked, binding the filling together.
Cooked bacon
Adds savory flavor and fat to the filling.

The step that matters

Wet the edges, then seal with a fork. Moistened edges let the top and bottom layers of paste bond; without a firm seal, the filling can leak out and the pie can open during 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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes