Name: A Giblet Pie
Ingredients: 2 sets of goose giblets; 2 quarts of water; a few whole peppercorns; a little mace; some sweet herbs; 1 large onion, sliced; 1 rump steak; pie crust

Why it works: Mace and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,078 recipes. Both carry eugenol, which smells clove, spicy. The science ↓

A Giblet Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the giblets

Clean the giblets thoroughly.
Divide the wings and necks in half and cut the gizzards into pieces.

Stew

Stew the giblets (except the livers) in water with peppercorns, mace, sweet herbs, and onion until tender.

Assemble and bake

Line a dish with pie crust and place the rump steak at the bottom.
Add the stewed giblets and livers on top of the steak.
Cover with more pie crust and bake until golden brown.

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.

Mace + oniontop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,078 recipes

Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

What each ingredient does

Rump steak: Adds meat and savoury flavour to the filling beneath the giblets.
Pie crust: Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form the golden top and base.
Goose giblets: Provide the main meat and rich flavour of the pie filling once stewed until tender.

“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.