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Sea Pie

A pie of meat and vegetables topped with a suet and flour crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Sea Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the meat into neat pieces.

  2. Dip the meat pieces in flour, salt, and pepper.

Make the pie

  1. In a saucepan, combine the meat and vegetables with enough cold water to cover them.

  2. Bring to a boil.

  3. Add a pinch of salt and pepper.

  4. In a bowl, mix ½ pound of flour, ¼ pound of suet, and ¼ teaspoon of baking powder.

  5. Add cold water to form a stiff paste.

  6. Roll the dough to fit the top of the pan.

  7. Place the rolled dough on top of the meat mixture and cover the saucepan with a lid.

  8. Stew gently for 1.5 hours.

  9. Loosen the crust from the sides occasionally.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat and vegetables on a dish with the crust on top.

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. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + oniontop 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

Meat scraps
Provide the main savoury filling that cooks tender during the long gentle stew.
Flour
Forms the stiff paste for the crust and lightly coats the meat, helping it hold together.
Suet
Adds fat to the crust, keeping it rich and tender as it cooks.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the crust so it is less dense.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 1.5 hours. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil keeps the meat tender and prevents the filling from toughening or the crust from breaking apart.

Swap the onion

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

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

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