Skip to main content
Main

Roast Grouse

Roast grouse cooked by trussing, basting, and serving with bacon, butter, and toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Roast Grouse

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the birds

  1. Hang the birds as long as possible, then pluck and draw them without washing.

  2. Truss the birds without the head, cutting off the neck at the backbone.

Roast

  1. Place them in a dripping pan with ¼ cup of water and keep well‑basted.

  2. Put 1 ounce of butter inside each bird and blanket them with strips of bacon.

  3. Lay the birds on the dry toast in the dripping pan.

  4. Moisten them with stock as they begin to dry, basting and turning several times until cooked.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot platter garnished with parsley or cress, with the toast cut into points.

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 + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Grouse
Provides the main meat, which is kept moist by basting during roasting.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, moistening the birds and helping the skin brown.
Bacon
Lies over the birds, adding fat that bastes the meat and flavours it as it cooks.
Dry toast
Sits under the birds to catch drippings and soak up their juices.
Stock
Moistens the birds as they dry, adding savoury flavour and keeping the surface from scorching.

The step that matters

Moisten and baste as the birds dry. Lean game dries out quickly in dry heat. Regular basting with stock or drippings keeps the surface moist and the meat tender, and turning the birds lets them cook evenly.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes