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Beef Steak Pie

A savory pie filled with stewed beef steak, hard‑boiled egg yolks, and herbs, topped with short pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Beef Steak Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Cut the steaks into pieces and sauté them in a pan with butter, parsley, and thyme.

  2. Add a little water and let the steaks stew until tender.

Assemble the pie

  1. Roll out the short pastry and line a pie dish with it.

  2. Place the stewed steaks in the dish, adding the hard-boiled egg yolks, pepper, and salt.

  3. Cover the pie with more pastry, trim the edges, and seal it.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden brown.

  2. If the pie needs more gravy, add some good beef stock before serving.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Tender steaks from the rump
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through sautéing and slow stewing in liquid.
Short pastry
Forms the crust that encloses the filling and browns in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour for browning the steaks at the start of cooking.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a creamy texture to the filling.
Beef stock
Adds meaty flavour and extra gravy to the pie when needed.

The step that matters

Stewing the steaks until tender. Rump steak needs enough time in a little liquid for its tough connective tissue to soften. If it is undercooked, the filling stays chewy once baked inside the pastry, where it cannot be adjusted.

Swap the thyme

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

  1. Tarragonfits about as well
  2. Thymethe original
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, butter, egg, pepper, beef. 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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