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Woodcock Pie

A pie filled with woodcock stuffed with forcemeat and green truffles, topped with puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Woodcock 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

  1. Prepare the light forcemeat and mix in the pounded green truffles.

  2. Fill the boned woodcock with the forcemeat and place them in a deep dish.

  3. Surround the birds with additional forcemeat.

  4. Cover the dish with puff pastry and brush the top with beaten egg.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, reduce the liquor from the bones to a glaze.

  2. Add the cullis and Madeira wine to the glaze.

  3. Season the sauce with Cayenne pepper and lemon juice.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until three-quarters done.

  2. Pour the sauce over the birds and finish baking until fully cooked.

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

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

  2. Truffle + madeira winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together195 recipes
  3. Truffle + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,604 recipes

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Truffle + peppertop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,106 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Woodcock
Provides the main meat, which is cooked inside the pastry and forcemeat.
Egg
Glazing egg brushed on the pastry gives it a golden, browned finish.
Puff pastry
Forms the flaky crust that encloses the birds and forcemeat while baking.
Madeira wine
Adds a rich, sweet, aromatic depth to the reduced sauce.

The step that matters

Bake until three-quarters done before adding the sauce. Baking in stages lets the birds finish cooking gently once the sauce is added, so the meat stays moist rather than overcooked while the pastry sets and browns.

“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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