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Green Goose Pie

A pie made by placing one young green goose inside another, seasoned, buttered, and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,395 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Green Goose 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 the geese

  1. Bone the geese and remove all plugs, then singe them nicely.

  2. Wash the geese and season them generously with salt, pepper, mace, and allspice.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place one goose inside the other, pressing them closely together and drawing the legs inward.

  2. Cover the geese with a good amount of butter.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven, with or without a crust. If without, ensure the dish is covered tightly to retain steam.

  4. Serve with gravy-jelly if desired.

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 + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  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).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Geese
Provide the rich meat and fat that form the body of the pie.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture, keeping the meat tender and rich as it bakes.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat deeply and helps draw out moisture for flavour.

The step that matters

Cover the dish tightly when baking without a crust. Without a crust, a tight cover traps steam around the meat, keeping it moist and preventing the surface from drying out in the hot oven.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, allspice, 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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