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To Roast Partridge or Any Small Birds

A method of roasting small birds with bacon, bread, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

To Roast Partridge or Any Small Birds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and roast

  1. Lard the birds with slices of bacon.

  2. Dredge and baste them.

  3. Place them in a pan and roast for 10 minutes.

Brown the bread and serve

  1. In a stew pan, lightly shake the grated bread until brown.

  2. Lay the browned bread between the birds and pour melted butter over them.

  3. Serve very hot.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Small birds (like partridge)
Lean main protein that is cooked through by roasting and served as the centre of the dish.
Slices of bacon
Fat that melts over the birds, keeping the lean meat moist and adding savoury flavour.
Bread, grated
Crumbs that brown in the pan and soak up the melted butter, adding toasty flavour and texture.
Melted butter
Fat that adds richness, helps the bread brown, and moistens the birds.

The step that matters

Roasting the birds. Partridges are lean, so they dry out quickly in the oven. Roasting only as long as the record states, with bacon and butter for moisture, helps keep the meat juicy.

“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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