Name: How to Cook a Pheasant
Ingredients: 1 pheasant; 2 snipes; ½ cup cooked beef marrow; 2 tablespoons lard; ¼ teaspoon pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 1 tablespoon fine herbs; good truffles (enough to fill the pheasant)

Why it works: Pheasant and beef work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 131 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

How to Cook a Pheasant

Ingredients

Directions

Wait until the pheasant shows a slight smell and color change before plucking.
Pluck the pheasant carefully.
Stick small slices of firm lard onto the pheasant.
Bone the snipes and separate the meat from the liver and entrails.
Chop the snipes' meat finely and mix with cooked beef marrow, lard, pepper, salt, fine herbs, and truffles.
Stuff the mixture into the pheasant, ensuring it does not protrude.

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.

Pheasant + beeftop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together131 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Beef + truffletop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together412 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-ethylphenol (must).
Pheasant + truffletop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together133 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).
Pheasant + peppertop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together462 recipes

Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).