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A Pot Pie

A savory pie of fowl, ham, potatoes, and suet‑flour pastry, boiled in water and thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,305 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

A Pot Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the fowl pieces and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Make a paste with 1.5 pounds of minced suet and 3 pounds of flour.

  3. Roll out the paste and cut into long squares.

  4. Butter the sides of a pot and line them with the paste.

Assemble and cook

  1. Layer sliced cold ham at the bottom, followed by fowl pieces and quartered potatoes, interspersed with squares of paste.

  2. Cover with a lid of paste, leaving a hole in the center.

  3. Pour in 1 quart of water, cover the pot, and boil slowly for 2 hours.

  4. Half an hour before serving, add bits of butter rolled in flour through the hole to thicken the gravy.

Serve

  1. Serve the pie on a large dish and pour the gravy over it.

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. Pepper + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + hamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

Fowl
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow boiling.
Suet
Adds fat to the paste, keeping it rich and tender as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Forms the paste that wraps and layers the pie, giving it structure.
Potatoes
Add starch and body, soaking up flavour from the pot and bulking the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and, mixed with flour, thickens the gravy.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour through the hole. Flour-butter pieces added to hot liquid need to be given time to dissolve and stir in, or they form lumps and the gravy thickens unevenly.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, flour, butter, ham):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Okrafits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, butter, ham. 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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