Skip to main content
Main

Pheasant Pie

A savory pie made with pheasant, partridge breast, chutney, butter, and gravy.

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

Why it works: Pheasant and pepper work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 462 recipes. Both carry sabinene, which smells woody, terpenic. The science ↓

Pheasant Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the pheasant

  1. Prepare the pheasant by singeing and drawing it.

  2. Extract the gall from the liver and pound it in a mortar with the partridge meat, chutney, and butter.

  3. Stuff this mixture inside the pheasant and baste it with butter.

  4. Roast the pheasant for 15 minutes in a 400°F (200°C) oven.

  5. Let it cool, then sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cut it up.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the pieces in a pie dish lined with crust and pour over some gravy made from boiling down the remaining partridge.

  2. Cover with another crust and bake for 1 hour at 350°F (175°C).

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. Pheasant + peppertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together462 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  2. Pheasant + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together511 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Pheasant
Forms the main meat of the pie, cooked first and then baked within the crust.
Partridge breast
Its pounded meat forms the moist, savoury stuffing, and its boiled-down juices make the gravy.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, keeping the stuffing and pheasant moist as they cook.
Bengal chutney
Adds sweetness, acidity and spice that flavour the stuffing.

The step that matters

Roast the pheasant before assembling. Roasting only 15 minutes leaves the bird partly cooked, so the longer pie bake must finish it safely and fully. Letting it cool before cutting keeps the juices in the meat rather than running out.

“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

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