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Squirrel Pie

A pie made with stewed squirrel, seasoned with pepper and salt, thickened with flour, topped with pie crust and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,459 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Squirrel Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Clean the squirrel and soak it in a mixture of coarse sea salt and water for 1 hour.

  2. Remove the squirrel from the water and wash it.

Make the filling

  1. Stew the squirrel until tender, then season with pepper and salt.

  2. Thicken the stew with flour and place it in a dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover with pie crust and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

  2. Serve in the dish it was baked in.

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 + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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

Squirrel
Is the main protein, becoming tender through slow stewing.
Flour
Thickens the stew liquid so the filling holds together under the crust.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form a golden top.

The step that matters

Thicken the stew with flour. Flour must be cooked into the hot liquid to thicken it evenly; added raw or in clumps it stays grainy and the filling can turn out watery or lumpy.

“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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