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Beef Steak and Oyster Pie

A savory pie filled with tender beef steak and oysters, seasoned with pepper, salt, shallot, lemon, mace, parsley, cream, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Beef Steak and Oyster Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA sharp oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Gently beat the steak until tender.

  2. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and minced shallot.

  3. Layer the steak with oysters in a pie dish.

Make the stew

  1. Stew the oyster liquor and beards with lemon, mace, and parsley.

  2. Boil the stew with cream and butter, strain it, and pour into the pie.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake the pie until done.

  2. Serve hot.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef steak
Provides the main meaty body of the filling; gentle beating helps tenderise the muscle fibres.
Oysters
Add a briny, savoury flavour to the filling and stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the stew a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the stew, softening its flavour.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, shallot, oyster, lemon, parsley, cream):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, shallot, oyster, lemon, parsley, cream. 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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