Name: Grouse Pie
Ingredients: 4 grouse, plucked and drawn; coarse sea salt; Cayenne pepper; 2 ounces fresh butter; strong unflavoured stock; puff pastry

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Grouse 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

Cut the grouse in half lengthwise.
Season the inside and outside with coarse sea salt and a little Cayenne pepper.
Place half an ounce of fresh butter inside each bird.

Assemble and bake

Arrange the birds close together in a dish with the breast side down.
Cover with strong unflavoured stock and puff pastry.
Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Serve

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.

Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Grouse: Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and juicy during the long, covered bake.
Fresh butter: Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and keeping the meat moist as it cooks.
Puff pastry: Forms a crisp, golden, flaky crust that browns in the oven and seals in the juices.
Strong unflavoured stock: Adds moisture and body, forming a savoury liquid that keeps the birds from drying out.

The step that matters

Arrange the birds close together with the breast side down. Packing the birds snugly limits the空 space and keeps them from drying out, while breast-side-down placement keeps the leaner breast meat shielded from direct heat and in the cooking liquid.

“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.