Name: Fish Pie
Ingredients: ½ lb rough puff pastry; 2 lbs fish; 2 hard boiled eggs; a few mushrooms; ¾ cup white stock; ½ a lemon; salt and pepper

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fish Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

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

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

Assemble

Line a dish with thin pastry.
Fill it with fish cut into pieces, sliced hard boiled eggs, and mushrooms. Season well with salt and pepper.
Pour over the white stock, which can be made from the skin and bones of the fish.
Cover with pastry and ornament the top.

Bake

Bake for 45 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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Fish + mushroomtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together444 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,633 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Fish + lemontop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,889 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

Rough puff pastry: Forms the flaky, rich crust that covers and encloses the filling.
Fish: Provides the main filling, cooking gently in the pie's steam and stock.
Hard boiled eggs: Add body and richness to the filling as they are sliced through it.
White stock: Adds moisture and savoury flavour, keeping the filling from drying out in the oven.
Mushrooms: Add earthy savoury flavour and moisture to the filling.

“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.