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Sea Pie

Sea Pie is a beef and vegetable pie made with suet pastry and seasoned with pepper and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sea Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the beef steak into neat pieces and slice the onions and carrots.

Make the stew

  1. Layer the meat and vegetables in a saucepan, sprinkle with pepper and coarse sea salt, and add enough water to cover.

  2. Cook slowly for 1 hour.

Add dumplings and serve

  1. Divide the pastry into 8 or 10 portions and roll them into small dumplings.

  2. Add the dumplings to the saucepan and cook for an additional 30 minutes.

  3. Serve with the dumplings around the dish and the meat and vegetables in the center.

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 + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beef + carrottop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef steak
Slow cooking in liquid breaks down its connective tissue, making the meat tender.
Suet pastry
Forms soft dumplings that steam in the stew and absorb its flavour.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, adding savoury depth to the stew.
Carrots
Soften during slow cooking and add natural sweetness to the stew.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for 1 hour. Gentle, low simmering keeps the meat tender; a hard boil toughens muscle fibres and can leave the beef chewy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, pepper. 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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