Skip to main content
Main

Partridges a LA Jardiniere

Partridges à la Jardinière is a dish of partridges cooked with carrots, turnips, onions, butter, sugar, flour, and stock.

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

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Partridges a LA Jardiniere

Ingredients

Directions

Make the vegetables

  1. In a stewpan, combine carrots, turnips, button onions, butter, and powdered sugar.

  2. Cook over high heat until vegetables are glazed.

  3. Add flour and stock, then simmer until vegetables are tender, skimming as needed.

Cook the partridges and serve

  1. Roast the partridges until slightly underdone.

  2. Add the partridges to the sauce and simmer gently for 20 minutes.

  3. Skim off any fat, then serve the birds on a dish with sauce and vegetables poured over.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Partridges
Provide the main protein, which finishes cooking gently in the sauce to stay tender.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the vegetables glaze and brown lightly in the pan.
Powdered sugar
Encourages browning and caramelization on the vegetables during glazing.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a sauce that coats the vegetables and birds.
Stock or gravy
Supplies the liquid base of the sauce and adds savory depth.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and color, and holds its shape through the simmer.

The step that matters

Roast the partridges until slightly underdone. Birds keep cooking after leaving the oven and again in the simmering sauce, so stopping short of full doneness prevents dry, tough meat.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, butter, sugar, flour):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, butter, sugar, flour. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes