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Duck Pie

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Duck Pie

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare brown gravy and mix in port wine, catsup, curry or cayenne, and made mustard.

  2. Thicken the gravy with butter rolled in flour.

  3. In a pie dish, layer beef steak at the bottom and add rabbit joints.

  4. Rub rabbit livers with butter, mix with bread crumbs, and season with pepper and salt.

  5. Strew the mixture between the layers of meat.

  6. Cover with a puff pastry crust, rolling it thin.

  7. Bake for 2 hours, removing from the oven as soon as the crust is done.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Mustard + rabbittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together56 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

  4. Beef + rabbittop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together252 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (port wine, butter, flour, beef, rabbit, bread, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, butter, flour, beef, rabbit, bread, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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