Skip to main content
Main

Partridge Pie

A pie made with partridges, gravy, eggs, ketchup, and puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,395 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Partridge Pie

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.

Prepare the partridges

  1. Pluck and draw the partridges.

  2. Carve three partridges into six pieces each: wings, legs, breast, neck, head, and back.

  3. Keep one partridge whole and trussed.

  4. Season the pieces with pepper, salt, and ground mace, then place them in a deep dish.

  5. Stuff the whole partridge and place it in the center of the dish, breast side up.

Make the gravy

  1. In a saucepan, combine the beef gravy, roasted shallots, and allspice; bring to a boil.

  2. Add the yolks of the hard boiled eggs and ketchup to the gravy mixture.

  3. Pour the mixture over the game in the dish.

Bake

  1. Cover the dish with puff pastry and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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 + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Shallot + allspicetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together386 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Mace + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pepper + shallottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Provide the main meat, which is cooked within the pie under the pastry.
Hard boiled egg yolks
Enrich the gravy and thicken it slightly as it sets with the pastry.
Beef gravy
Supplies the liquid that moistens the game and forms the sauce.
Puff pastry
Forms a crisp, golden crust that seals the dish and browns in the oven.
Roasted shallots
Add a mild, sweet savour to the gravy.

The step that matters

Bring the gravy to a boil before adding the egg yolks and ketchup. Boiling the gravy with the shallots and allspice lets the flavours meld, and adding the yolks and ketchup afterward keeps the sauce smooth and prevents the yolks from becoming grainy from overheating.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, beef, shallot, allspice, egg, ketchup):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, beef, shallot, allspice, egg, ketchup. 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes