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Pheasant, Roast

Roasted pheasants seasoned with bacon, flour, and served with watercress and brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 the birds

  1. Pluck, draw, and singe the pheasants.

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

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

Roast

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

  2. Baste liberally while roasting for about 45 minutes.

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

Serve

  1. 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. 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

Pheasants
Provide the lean meat that is the main component of the dish.
Fat bacon
Bastes the breasts with melting fat, keeping the lean meat moist during roasting.
Flour
Dusted on the birds, it helps form a light, browned crust on the surface.
Brown gravy
Adds moisture and savoury richness to the dry, lean roasted meat.

The step that matters

Basting while roasting. Lean game birds dry out easily over heat. Regular basting with fat keeps the surface moist and helps the skin 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.

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