Skip to main content
Main

Roasted Partridge

Roasted partridge covered with salt pork, baked, served with bread sauce.

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

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Roasted Partridge

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Roast

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cover the partridge with thin slices of salt pork and dredge it with flour.

  3. Bake for about 45 minutes, basting often with hot water and butter.

Serve

  1. Place the roasted partridge on a hot platter.

  2. Fry the coarse bread crumbs in butter and surround the partridge with them.

  3. Serve with 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Partridge
Is the main dish, cooked whole so it roasts evenly and stays moist.
Salt pork
Lays fat over the bird, keeping the lean meat moist and adding savoury flavour as it bastes.
Flour
Dredging coats the skin, helping it brown and form a light crust.
Butter
Basting adds fat that promotes browning and flavour; frying gives the crumbs a golden, rich coating.
Coarse bread crumbs
Fried in butter, they add crisp texture and contrast to the tender meat.

The step that matters

Basting the partridge during the bake. Lean game birds dry out easily. Regular basting with hot water and butter keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly rather than drying in the oven heat.

“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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes