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Salmi of Pheasant

A roasted pheasant served with a brown sauce made from butter, thyme, bay leaf, brown sauce, sherry, cayenne, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,973 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Salmi of Pheasant

Ingredients

Directions

Roast and cut

  1. Roast the pheasant until slightly more than half-cooked.

  2. Remove the pheasant from heat and let it cool.

  3. Cut the pheasant into neat joints and remove skin and fat.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt butter with thyme and bay leaf over low heat until lightly browned.

  2. Add brown sauce and sherry, then simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  3. Strain the gravy, skim off fat, and add cayenne and lemon juice.

  4. Return the sauce to the saucepan with the pheasant pieces and heat gradually without boiling.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot dish, pour sauce over, and garnish with fried sippets.

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. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Thyme + sherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together702 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Pheasant + thymetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

  4. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Pheasant
Provides the main meat, which is partly roasted first and then finished gently in the sauce.
Butter
Browns with the herbs to add a nutty, rich flavour base for the sauce.
Brown sauce
Forms the body and savoury flavour of the gravy that coats the pheasant.
Sherry
Adds depth and a mildly sweet, acidic note to the simmered sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the pheasant gradually without boiling. Boiling toughens meat proteins and makes them dry and stringy, so the sauce should only be heated slowly once the pheasant pieces are added.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, butter, thyme, sauce, sherry):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Apricotfits less well
  4. Grapefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, butter, thyme, sauce, sherry. 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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