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Curry of Pheasants a LA Moderne

A pheasant curry with onions, shallots, carrot, celery, ham, peas, butter, sugar, salt, and imperial sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Curry of Pheasants a LA Moderne

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pheasant

  1. Cut each roasted pheasant into nine pieces: two from each breast, three from the central breast, and two from each thigh.

  2. Trim the pieces to make them uniform, keeping the skin on.

Make the curry base

  1. In a two-quart saucepan, fry the onion, shallots, carrot, celery, and ham in clarified butter until slightly browned.

Prepare the peas and serve

  1. Prepare the peas by boiling them for 2 minutes, then strain and toss in a saucepan with butter, sugar, and salt.

  2. Place half of the peas in the center of two serving dishes.

  3. Arrange the pheasant pieces in a circle around the peas and divide the sauce a l'imperial between the dishes.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Shallot + peastop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together173 recipes

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

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Carrot + peastop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,994 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Pheasants
Provide the main cooked meat, which is served in pieces around the peas.
Onion, shallots, carrot, celery
Fried until slightly browned to build a savoury, aromatic base for the dish.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour to the fried vegetable base.
Sauce a l'imperial
Adds moisture and rich flavour to the pheasant and peas served on each dish.

The step that matters

Fry the vegetables until slightly browned. Browning the onion, shallots, carrot and celery in fat develops sweet, deeper flavours through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation. Stopping too early leaves the base flat, while burning makes it bitter.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, onion, shallot, carrot, celery, ham, butter):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Lentilsfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, onion, shallot, carrot, celery, ham, butter. 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.

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