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Game Pie

A savory pie made with game birds, broth, spices, salt pork, butter, flour, potatoes, and biscuit dough.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Game Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the game birds by cutting them into suitable sizes.

  2. Place the birds in a large cooker kettle with soup stock or broth, or cold water.

  3. Bring to a boil over a hot fire, skimming as necessary.

Simmer the birds

  1. Add salt, pepper, ground cloves, mace, bay leaf, carrots, and onion.

  2. Add sliced salt pork and ensure the broth covers the birds.

  3. Clamp the kettle cover and set in the cooker for one hour over a hot plate.

Assemble and bake

  1. In a shallow pan, mix butter and browned flour, then stir in some broth to make a thin sauce.

  2. Add the meat from the birds and duplicate its bulk with diced potato.

  3. Cover with biscuit dough and bake for 25 minutes between two hot discs.

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

What each ingredient does

Game birds
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender during the long, gentle simmer.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the thin sauce, carrying flavour and smoothness.
Browned flour
Thickens the sauce and adds a toasted, nutty flavour.
Salt pork
Adds savoury fat and seasoning that enriches the broth.
Biscuit dough (in the method)
Forms the crust that bakes into a light, flaky top over the filling.

The step that matters

Simmering the birds with the lid clamped. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer under a sealed lid tenderises tough game meat slowly. Boiling hard would toughen the proteins and make the broth cloudy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quail, beef, pepper, clove, carrot, onion, pork):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against quail, beef, pepper, clove, carrot, onion, pork. 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.

More game pie recipes

English 13Christmas 6Forcemeat 4Raised 4Venison and Hare 4French 3 See all 39 →

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