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Fresh Pork Pot-pie

A pot pie made with boiled pork sparerib, seasoned, thickened with flour, topped with a butter crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fresh Pork Pot-pie

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the meat

  1. Boil the sparerib until tender, skimming off any scum.

  2. Season the meat with salt and pepper.

  3. Thicken the gravy with a little flour half an hour before serving.

  4. Remove the bones and most of the gravy, leaving enough to cover the pot half an inch above the rim.

Make the crust

  1. Mix a small amount of butter into a light dough.

  2. Roll the dough out thin.

  3. Cut the dough into small squares.

  4. Place the crust squares on a board until they are light.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover the pot tightly.

  2. Boil steadily for 45 minutes, ensuring no steam escapes.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Sparerib
Provides the meat and rich flavour that the gravy is built from.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it is stirred into the cooking liquid.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the dough, tenderising the crust.

“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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