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Vegetable Pie

A savory pie filled with sautéed carrots, turnips, mushrooms, celery, and onion, topped with pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

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

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Clean and slice the vegetables.

  2. Gently sauté them in butter for 10 minutes without letting them discolor.

  3. Partly cook the vegetables in a small amount of water, cooking the carrots first.

  4. Let the mixture cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the vegetables in a pie dish and cover with pastry.

  2. Glaze and decorate as for a meat pie.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 30 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. 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. 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

Carrots
Provide bulk and sweetness, and they are partly cooked first because they are firmer than the other vegetables.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor when the vegetables are gently sautéed.
Flaky pastry
Forms the crust that encloses the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Gently sautéing the vegetables. Cooking over high heat browns the vegetables and can make them taste bitter or scorched. Gentle heat softens them and keeps their color and flavor clean before they go into the pie.

Swap the onion

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

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

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