Name: Meat Pie
Ingredients: ¾ pound all-purpose flour; ¼ pound dripping (or lard); ¾ teaspoon baking powder; 2 pounds Australian meat (or 1½ pounds meat and ½ pound kidneys); water to taste

Why it works: Flour and meat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 28% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,529 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Meat Pie

Ingredients

¾ pound all-purpose flour
¼ pound dripping (or lard)
¾ teaspoon baking powder
2 pounds Australian meat (or 1½ pounds meat and ½ pound kidneys)
water to taste

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

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
In a bowl, mix the flour, dripping, and baking powder until crumbly.
Press the mixture into a quart dish to form a crust.
Cut the meat into pieces and season to taste.

Bake

Add a little water, cover, and bake for 30 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.

Flour + meattop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,529 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour: Forms the structure of the crust once mixed and baked.
Dripping (or lard): Adds fat that makes the crust short and tender rather than tough.
Baking powder: Releases gas during baking so the crust rises and lightens.
Meat: Forms the savoury filling that the crust encloses.

“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.