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Braised Pheasant

A pheasant braised with bacon, sweet herbs, game stock, stale bread, lemon rind, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and port wine work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 321 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Braised Pheasant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pheasant

  1. Pluck, singe, draw, and wipe the pheasant.

  2. Stuff the pheasant with a mixture of grated stale bread and grated lemon rind.

  3. Truss the pheasant and braise it with bacon, sweet herbs, and game stock.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Once cooked, strain and skim the braise, then pour it into a game sauce.

  2. Finish the sauce with a glass of port wine and serve the pheasant with some of the ragout underneath and sauce on top.

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. Bread + port winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together321 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + port winetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Pheasant + lemontop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together163 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

Pheasant
Is the main protein, cooked slowly in liquid so it stays moist and tender.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the braising liquid, enriching the sauce.
Game stock
Provides the liquid for braising and the base of the sauce, carrying flavour into it.
Grated stale bread
Absorbs juices from the bird during cooking, giving the stuffing a soft, moist texture.
Grated lemon rind
Adds bright aromatic citrus oil that lifts the rich, gamey flavour.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to the sauce, rounding out its richness.

The step that matters

Strain and skim the braise. Skimming removes fat and loose impurities that would make the sauce greasy and cloudy, while straining gives it a smooth, clean texture.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, bread, port wine):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, bread, port wine. 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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