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Pheasant, Curried

A pheasant dish stewed in curry sauce with mango chutney and desiccated coconut, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mango and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 221 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Pheasant, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the cold cooked pheasant into nice-sized pieces.

  2. Stew the pheasant pieces gently in ½ pint of good curry sauce.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of mango chutney and 1 tablespoon of desiccated coconut.

  4. Serve in a border of boiled rice.

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. Mango + coconuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together221 recipes

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

  2. Coconut + ricetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,063 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Mango + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together183 recipes

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

  4. Pheasant + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together52 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Pheasant + saucetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (soapy, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold cooked pheasant
Main protein, which stays tender and absorbs flavour when gently simmered in the sauce.
Good curry sauce
Provides the main liquid and spice flavour that the pheasant pieces cook in.
Mango chutney
Adds sweetness and fruity acidity to balance the sharp spices of the curry sauce.
Desiccated coconut
Adds fat, mild sweetness and a little body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stew the pheasant gently. The pheasant is already cooked, so it only needs to warm through. A hard boil toughens meat proteins and dries the pieces out, so keep the sauce at a gentle simmer.

Swap the mango

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, sauce, coconut, rice):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Mangothe original
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, sauce, coconut, rice. 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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