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Brillat Savarin’s Recipe for Roast Pheasant

A pheasant roasted with a truffle and anchovy stuffing, served on bread and surrounded by oranges.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Brillat Savarin’s Recipe for Roast Pheasant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pluck the pheasant and prepare it for cooking.

  2. Draw the snipe, mince the flesh with a little beef, lard, truffles, pepper, and salt.

  3. Stuff the pheasant with the minced mixture.

Make the bread base

  1. Cut a slice of bread larger than the bird and cover it with the liver and truffles.

  2. Add an anchovy and a little fresh butter to the bread mixture.

  3. Place the bread mixture in a dripping pan.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast the pheasant and place it on the prepared bread, surrounding it with Florida oranges.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Pheasant + beeftop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together131 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + orangetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Bread + anchovytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,260 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Pheasant
Forms the main body of the dish and carries the stuffing while it roasts.
Snipe
Adds richly flavoured minced meat to the stuffing.
Truffles
Contributes a strong earthy aroma to the stuffing and bread.
Bread
Forms a base under the bird that soaks up drippings and fat.
Lard
Adds fat that keeps the stuffing moist and helps browning.
Anchovy
Adds a salty, savoury depth to the bread mixture.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, beef, truffle, pepper, bread, anchovy, butter):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Red currantfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, beef, truffle, pepper, bread, anchovy, butter. 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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