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Teal, Roasted

Roasted teal seasoned with coarse sea salt, cayenne pepper, and lemon juice, served with brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Teal, Roasted

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pluck and draw the teal birds, then truss them like wild duck.

  2. Season them well with coarse sea salt.

Roast

  1. Place the birds before a brisk fire without basting for the first 2-3 minutes.

  2. Afterwards, baste them liberally.

  3. Roast until nicely browned, about 10-15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot dish with a little brown gravy around them.

  2. Send additional gravy to the table in a tureen.

  3. Sprinkle a pinch of cayenne on the breast and squeeze lemon juice over it just before serving.

  4. Serve with a lemon on the side.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 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

Teal birds
Provide the main meat, which is lean and cooks quickly over high heat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, gamey flavour of the roasted meat.

The step that matters

Roast until nicely browned, about 10-15 minutes. Teal are small and lean, so high heat for a short time browns the skin while keeping the meat juicy. Overcooking dries the lean flesh, and the browning depends on the fire being brisk and the birds basted enough.

“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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