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Game Pie

A savory pie made with small game birds, salt pork, vegetables, and a buttery crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Game 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 the game

  1. Split each bird in half and place them in a saucepan with cold water or broth.

  2. Bring to a boil, skim, and season with pepper, salt, mace, cloves, and bay leaf.

  3. Add salt pork, carrots, and onion. Boil until tender, ensuring the broth covers the game.

Make the sauce

  1. In another saucepan, melt butter and mix in browned flour, stirring in some broth to create a thin sauce.

  2. Strain the broth from the first saucepan, discarding vegetables and spices.

Assemble and bake

  1. Dice the potatoes and place them in a deep baking dish.

  2. Pour the game mixture over the potatoes and cover with the top crust of dough.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Small birds
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long gentle simmering in the broth.
Salt pork
Adds savoury fat and flavour to the broth as it cooks.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and a rich flavour.
Browned flour
Thickens the broth into a sauce and adds a toasted, nutty flavour.
Potatoes
Add starch and bulk, soaking up the broth beneath the crust.
Dough top crust
Seals the pie and browns in the oven to a golden finish.

The step that matters

Simmering the birds until tender. Game birds are lean and can turn tough if boiled hard. Keeping the broth at a gentle simmer, with the birds fully covered, lets the connective tissue soften slowly without drying the meat.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quail, beef, pepper, clove, pork, carrot, onion):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quail, beef, pepper, clove, pork, carrot, onion. 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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