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Duck Pie

A baked pie made with a young duck, a young fowl, and a calf's tongue, seasoned with salt, pepper, mace, and allspice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Duck Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bone the duck and fowl, then wash them.

  2. Season the duck and fowl with salt, pepper, mace, and allspice.

  3. Place the fowl inside the duck, and add the calf's tongue inside the fowl.

  4. Press the whole tightly together.

Bake

  1. Bake in a dish, ensuring it is covered to retain steam.

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).

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

Duck
Forms the main body of the pie and provides the rich meat and fat that flavour the dish.
Fowl
Fills the duck and adds more meat, moistening the stuffing as it cooks.
Calf's tongue
Adds dense, tender meat inside the layered filling, giving the pie a substantial centre.

The step that matters

Press the whole tightly together. Packing the birds and tongue snugly keeps the layers in contact so they cook evenly and hold their shape when sliced. Loose packing leaves gaps that dry out or collapse during baking.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, allspice. 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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