Name: Roast Goose
Ingredients: 1 goose; 1 cup bread crumbs; 1 teaspoon powdered sage; 1 minced parboiled onion; ¼ teaspoon pepper; 1 teaspoon coarse sea salt; 1 egg yolk; apple sauce (for serving)

Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Goose

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Truss the goose and stuff the breast with bread crumbs, sage, onion, pepper, salt, and bind with egg yolk.
Boil the goose for 20 minutes to reduce the oily flavor, then roast it.

Roast and serve

Make gravy with the giblets while the goose roasts.
Serve with apple sauce in a sauceboat.

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.

Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,388 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Sage + appletop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together755 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Sage + oniontop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,628 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Goose: Is the main dish, with its fat rendering during roasting and boiling to reduce oiliness.
Bread crumbs: Absorb juices and fat in the stuffing, giving it a moist, tender body.
Egg yolk: Binds the stuffing ingredients together so they hold their shape.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sage, onion, pepper, egg, sauce):

Lemonfits better
Limefits better
Avocadofits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sage, onion, pepper, egg, sauce. 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.