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A Goose Pie

A pie made with a goose, fowl, and tongue, encased in a flour crust and baked with mace, pepper, salt, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

A Goose Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA very quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make a crust with the flour, large enough to hold a goose.

  2. Boil the tongue until tender and peel it.

  3. Bone the goose and the large fowl.

  4. Mix the mace, pepper, and salt; season the fowl and goose with this mixture.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the fowl inside the goose, then the tongue inside the fowl.

  2. Top with ½ pound of butter and cover with the crust.

  3. Bake until golden and serve hot or cold.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Mace + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Forms the crust that encloses the filling and holds its shape during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the crust brown.
Goose
Provides the main meat, whose rich fat keeps the filling moist as it cooks.
Large fowl
Fills the goose cavity, adding more meat and layered flavor to the pie.
Tongue
Adds a tender, rich meat layer to the filling.

The step that matters

Boning the goose and fowl. Removing the bones before layering lets the birds nest together compactly and cook evenly. Seasoning them first lets the spice mixture penetrate the meat, so the flavor is distributed throughout rather than sitting on the surface.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, pepper, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, butter. 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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