Name: Puree De Faisans En Croustade Garnie De Filets Piques
Ingredients: 3 pheasants, filleted; 25 grams butter; espanole sauce (or demi-glace); coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Why it works: Butter and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Puree De Faisans En Croustade Garnie De Filets Piques

Ingredients

3 pheasants, filleted
25 grams butter
espanole sauce (or demi-glace)
coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Directions

Prepare the pheasant

Remove the fillets from the pheasants and cut them in half lengthwise, shaping them into elongated pears.
Place the fillets in a buttered sauté pan, curving them to form a crown, and cover with buttered paper.
Wrap the remaining pheasants in buttered paper and roast them.

Make the purée

Once cooled, remove the meat, chop it, and mash it with 2 tablespoons of butter.
Moisten the purée with espagnole sauce reduced with pheasant stock.

Assemble and serve

Fill the croustade with the purée and arrange the cooked, glazed fillets around the edge.
Create a mound of purée in the center that rises 1.5 inches above the crown.
Glaze the fillets and serve.

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 + saucetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together15,338 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Pheasant + saucetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together290 recipes

Shared aroma: decanoic acid (soapy, waxy).
Pheasant + buttertop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together511 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Pheasants: Provide the main meat, which is cooked, mashed and formed into the purée and fillets.
Butter: Adds richness and a smooth texture to the mashed pheasant purée.
Espagnole sauce: Moistens the purée and adds savory depth and body.

“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.