Name: A Plain Goose Pie
Ingredients: 1 goose, quartered; ½ pound butter, cut into pieces; pepper, to taste; coarse sea salt, to taste; forcemeat (optional)

Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

A Plain Goose Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Season the quartered goose with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Place the goose in a raised pie crust.
Distribute the butter pieces on top of the goose.

Bake

Cover with the pie lid and bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until well baked.

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.

Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Goose: Provides the main meat, which cooks slowly under the crust to become tender.
Butter: Adds fat and moisture, enriching the meat as it bakes and keeping it from drying out.

“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.