Skip to main content
Main

Pheasant, Roast

Roasted pheasants seasoned with salt, coated in flour, and basted with bacon fat, served with watercress and brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Watercress and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 579 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pheasant, Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the birds

  1. Pluck, draw, and singe the pheasants.

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

  3. Lard or tie a piece of fat bacon around the breasts.

  4. Flour the pheasants well and place them before a clear fire.

Roast and serve

  1. Baste liberally while roasting for about 45 minutes.

  2. Remove the bacon when done and serve the birds on a hot dish.

  3. Garnish with watercress and serve with 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. Watercress + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fat bacon
Covers the breasts, keeping the lean meat moist as it roasts.
Flour
Coats the birds, helping the skin brown and crisp in the heat.
Brown gravy
Adds savoury moisture and richness to accompany the roasted birds.

The step that matters

Basting liberally while roasting. Lean game meat dries out quickly over a fire. Regular basting spreads fat and juices over the surface, keeping the flesh moist and the coating browned.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, flour, watercress):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, flour, watercress. 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.

More roasted pheasant recipes

and Partridge 4with Mushrooms 3 See all 50 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesPheasant SoupPheasant Soup25 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes