Skip to main content
Main

A Good Common English Game Pie

A savory pie filled with venison, hare, forcemeat, and spices, baked with a short crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

A Good Common English Game 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 meat

  1. Remove the flesh from the upper side of the neck of venison and trim it to fit the dish.

  2. Rub the venison with a mixture of coarse sea salt, cayenne pepper, pounded mace, and nutmeg.

  3. Cut the hare into joints and fill them with forcemeat No. 1, adding extra butter, minced eschalots, and chopped liver.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line the dish with a rich short crust, place the venison in the center, and arrange the hare around it.

  2. Fill any gaps with more forcemeat and add a few spoons of well-jellied gravy.

  3. Securely fasten the cover and bake the pie for 2 hours in a well-heated oven at 400 °F (200 °C).

Use the leftovers

  1. Use the remnants of the hare and venison to make soup or gravy, adding it to the pie 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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Venison + hamtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Venison neck
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and richly flavoured during the long bake.
Hare
Provides the game meat and, with its liver, a deep, rich flavour through the filling.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the forcemeat and gives a moist, tender texture.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the rich short crust that holds the pie together.
Forcemeat
Fills gaps around the meat, adding moisture and binding the filling together as it cooks.

The step that matters

Fasten the cover securely before baking. A tightly sealed crust keeps steam and juices inside the pie, so the meat cooks gently in its own moisture rather than drying out.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (venison, pepper, nutmeg, butter, liver, flour, ham):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against venison, pepper, nutmeg, butter, liver, flour, ham. 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.

You might also like

Roast VenisonRoast Venison20 recipesVenison PastyVenison Pasty7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes