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Goose Pie

A savory pie made with goose, turkey, fowl, ham, tongue, and spices, baked with a crust and melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Goose Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Prepare a strong raised crust with thick sides.

  2. Remove bones from the goose, turkey, and fowl, cutting each down the back.

  3. Season the meat with pepper, salt, mace, cloves, and nutmeg.

Assemble the pie

  1. Layer the goose in a dish with the breast skin down, followed by turkey, ham, tongue, and fowl.

  2. Cover with bits of ham or bacon.

  3. Shape the pie in an oval form, with sides standing 1½ inches above the meat.

  4. Cover with a top crust and make a hole in the center.

Bake and finish

  1. Brush the outside with beaten egg whites.

  2. Bind the crust with buttered paper.

  3. Bake until golden.

  4. Remove the paper.

  5. Pour in melted butter through the hole.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Goose
Provides the rich, fatty meat that forms the body of the pie.
Egg whites
Brushed on the outside, they help the crust brown and turn golden in the oven.
Butter
Poured in melted through the hole, it adds richness and moisture to the filled pie.
Turkey
Adds lean meat layers that give the pie bulk and a firm, sliceable texture.

The step that matters

Bind the crust with buttered paper. The paper holds the sides of the raised crust in shape while it bakes, so the walls do not slump and the pie keeps its oval form.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, ham, pepper, clove, nutmeg, butter, egg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, ham, pepper, clove, nutmeg, butter, egg. 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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