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Woodcock Pie

A savory pie filled with woodcock, forcemeat, entrails, green truffles, and puff pastry, served with a sauce of cullis, Madeira wine, cayenne, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 the birds

  1. Fill the boned woodcock with light forcemeat, entrails, and pounded green truffles.

  2. Place the birds in a deep dish with some forcemeat around them.

Bake

  1. Cover with puff pastry and glaze the top with beaten egg.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until three-quarters done.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Prepare a sauce with the reduced liquor from the bones, add to it the cullis and Madeira wine.

  2. Season the sauce with cayenne pepper and lemon juice, then pour it over the birds before serving.

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 filled, baked and served in the pie.
Puff pastry
Forms a crisp, flaky, golden crust that encloses the birds while they bake.
Egg
Glazes the pastry top, promoting even browning and a glossy finish.
Madeira wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the sauce as it reduces.
Cullis
Thickens the sauce and adds concentrated savoury body.
Green truffles
Add a strong earthy aroma to the filling.

The step that matters

Baking until three-quarters done. The birds finish cooking after the pie is served, so stopping at the right point matters. Underbaking leaves the meat raw, while overbaking dries it out and toughens the proteins.

“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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