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Lamb Pie

A savory pie with stewed lamb, potatoes, turnips, and asparagus, topped with a buttered crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and asparagus match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 328 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lamb 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 lamb

  1. Remove fat and bone from lamb steaks.

  2. Cut the lamb into 4‑inch square pieces.

  3. Season the lamb with salt and pepper.

  4. Place the seasoned lamb in a stew pot with ½ cup of water.

  5. Stew the lamb for about 45 minutes.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix ½ pound of butter with 1 pound of flour.

  2. Add cold water to the mixture to form a dough.

  3. Roll out the dough into a large, thin sheet.

  4. Spread the remaining butter over the dough.

  5. Fold the dough. Sprinkle the folded dough with flour.

  6. Divide the dough into two sheets.

  7. Roll each sheet out.

  8. Use the thicker sheet as the upper crust.

  9. Cover the bottom and sides of a pie dish with the thinner sheet.

Assemble and bake

  1. Add the stewed lamb and its gravy to the pie dish.

  2. Scatter sliced potatoes, boiled turnips, and asparagus tops over the filling.

  3. Dot the top with fresh butter.

  4. Place the upper crust on the filling. Crimp the edges to seal.

  5. Make a cross‑slit on the top crust.

  6. Bake the pie in a 400°F (200°C) oven until light 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. Turnip + asparagustop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together328 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + asparagustop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together217 recipes

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

  3. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + turniptop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Lamb + asparagustop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together207 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the dough's structure, which holds the filling and gives the crust its body.
Butter
Layered into the dough, it adds fat that makes the crust flaky and rich.
Lamb
Provides the savory meat base, made tender by slow stewing in its own gravy.
Potatoes
Add starch and bulk to the filling, absorbing savory juices as the pie bakes.

The step that matters

Folding and rolling the buttered dough. Butter spread between dough layers creates separate sheets; if the dough warms and the butter melts into it, the crust loses flakiness and becomes dense.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, pepper, butter, flour, potato, turnip, asparagus):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, pepper, butter, flour, potato, turnip, asparagus. 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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