Skip to main content
Main

Pheasant, Roast

A pheasant roasted with bacon, flour, and served with watercress and brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 340 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Pheasant, Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pluck, draw, and singe the pheasants.

  2. Wipe them with a dry cloth and truss firmly.

  3. Lard or tie bacon around the breasts.

Roast and serve

  1. Flour the pheasants well and roast before a clear fire, basting liberally.

  2. Once done, remove the bacon and serve the birds on a hot dish garnished with watercress.

  3. Serve with good brown gravy.

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. Flour + watercresstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together340 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pheasant + watercresstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

  3. Pheasant + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together225 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Fat bacon
Laid over the breasts, it keeps the lean meat moist and adds savoury fat as it renders.
Flour
Dusted on the birds, it helps form a browned crust during roasting.
Brown gravy
Served alongside the roast to add moisture and savoury richness to each portion.

The step that matters

Basting liberally while roasting. Pheasant is very lean and dries out quickly. Regular basting spreads fat and juices over the surface, keeping the meat moist and helping the flour coating brown 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.

More roasted pheasant recipes

and Partridge 4with Mushrooms 3 See all 50 →

You might also like

Pheasant SoupPheasant Soup25 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes