Name: Roast Goose, to Carve
Ingredients: 1 young goose; coarse sea salt; black pepper; 2 to 3 ounces fresh butter; watercress for garnish; brown gravy for serving

Why it works: Pepper and watercress work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roast Goose, to Carve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Truss the goose without stuffing it.
Season the inside with coarse sea salt and black pepper.
Place 2 to 3 ounces of fresh butter inside to moisten.

Roast and serve

Roast the goose over a clear, brisk fire until cooked through.
Serve with watercress around the goose and brown gravy on the side.

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 + watercresstop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together983 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + watercresstop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together842 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Goose: Provides the main body of the dish, with its rich fat rendering as it roasts.
Fresh butter: Adds moisture and richness inside the bird as it cooks.

“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.