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Fish Pies

A savory pie filled with cooked or fresh fish, seasoned with salt, pepper, cayenne, and mace or nutmeg, topped with a pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,580 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Fish Pies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Use remnants of cooked fish or fresh white fish for the pie.

  2. If using fresh fish, no preliminary cooking is needed; for eels, partially cook them first.

  3. Season the fish with salt, pepper, cayenne, and mace or nutmeg to taste.

  4. Stew fish bones for stock to enhance flavor, if convenient.

Assemble and bake

  1. Prepare a pie crust, ensuring it is thinner for cooked fish than for raw fish.

  2. Fill the pie with seasoned fish and cover with the crust.

  3. Bake until the crust is golden and the filling is heated through.

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 + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Fish + mushroomtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together444 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Fish + shrimptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together252 recipes

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

  4. Shrimp + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together635 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Cooked fish
Forms the main filling, providing flavor and body to the pie.
Fresh white fish
Adds delicate flaky texture when cooked in the pie.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form the outer structure.

The step that matters

Thinner crust for cooked fish. Cooked fish is already done and needs only to heat through, so a thinner crust that browns quickly avoids overbaking the filling while the crust sets and turns golden.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, pepper, shrimp, mushroom):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, pepper, shrimp, mushroom. 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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