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Cat-fish Pie

A pie filled with stewed catfish, seasoned with salt and pepper, topped with gravy and crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cat-fish 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

  1. Cut the fish into pieces and stew it with salt, pepper, and butter for a few minutes.

  2. Line a pan with pie crust and place the stewed fish inside.

Assemble and bake

  1. Cover the fish with gravy and add a top crust.

  2. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until golden brown.

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 + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Catfish + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together101 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Catfish + peppertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together215 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Catfish
Forms the main filling and provides the savory flesh of the pie.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor while the fish stews.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form the structure.
Gravy
Adds moisture so the filling stays juicy rather than drying out in the oven.

“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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