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Woodcock Pie

A pastry pie filled with woodcock, forcemeat, entrails, green truffles, and seasoned with cayenne and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Woodcock 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

  1. Fill the boned woodcock with light forcemeat, entrails, and pounded green truffles.

  2. Place the birds in a deep dish with some forcemeat around them.

  3. Cover with puff pastry and glaze the top with beaten egg.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until three-quarters done.

  2. Add the reduced woodcock bone liquor, cullis, and Madeira wine to the birds.

  3. Season with Cayenne pepper and lemon juice to taste.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Truffle + madeira winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together195 recipes
  3. Truffle + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,604 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Truffle + peppertop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,106 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Woodcock
Provides the main meat and rich, gamey flavour of the pie.
Light forcemeat
Adds a tender, moist stuffing that keeps the birds juicy as they cook.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, crisp crust that rises and browns in the oven.
Egg
Brushed on top to give the pastry a glossy, golden browned surface.
Woodcock bone liquor
Reduced to a glaze, it concentrates savoury flavour for the sauce.
Madeira wine
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the liquids after the first bake. The birds are only three-quarters cooked when the reduced liquor, cullis and Madeira go in, so the sauce must be added before the pastry overcooks. Adding it too early can leave the pastry soggy, while adding it too late leaves the sauce thin and underseasoned.

“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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