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Pheasant, Roast

Roasted pheasant served with bacon larding, flour dusting, watercress garnish, brown gravy, and bread sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 the pheasants or tie a slice of fat bacon around the breasts.

  4. Dust them well with flour.

Roast and serve

  1. Place them before a clear fire and baste liberally.

  2. When cooked, remove the bacon and serve the birds on a hot dish.

  3. Garnish with watercress and serve with brown gravy and bread sauce.

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).

  4. Watercress + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pheasant + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together239 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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
Lards or wraps the lean breast, adding fat that keeps the meat moist as it cooks.
Flour
Dusted on the birds to help form a browned crust during roasting.

The step that matters

Basting liberally. Pheasant meat is very lean and dries out easily, so regular basting with fat and juices keeps the flesh 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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