Name: Game Pie
Ingredients: 1 hare; Salt and pepper to taste; Aspic jelly for garnish; 2 cups good flavored stock; 1 pheasant, fowl, or partridge

Why it works: Pepper and pheasant work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 462 recipes. Both carry sabinene, which smells woody, terpenic. The science ↓

Game Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the meat

Stew the hare and pheasant, fowl, or partridge until the meat easily separates from the bones.
Remove the meat in large pieces and pack it into a game pie dish.
Season the meat well.

Make the stock and assemble

Stew the bones in the stock from the game. Season the bones.
Pour the hot stock over the meat.

Serve

Serve the pie cold.
Garnish with aspic jelly.

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.

Pepper + pheasanttop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together462 recipes

Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

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

What each ingredient does

Hare: Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and separates easily from the bones when stewed.
Pheasant, fowl, or partridge: Adds a second game meat, giving the pie a richer, more layered flavor.
Flavored stock: Carries moisture and flavor into the pie, and its gelatin sets the filling when cold.

“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.