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Boiled Partridges

Partridges boiled with salt, served with butter, lemon juice, and optional sauces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Boiled Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove feathers, clean, and wash the partridges thoroughly.

  2. Cut off the heads and truss them like boiled fowls.

Boil and serve

  1. Drop the partridges into a large pan of boiling water and add a little salt.

  2. Boil for 15 to 18 minutes until cooked through.

  3. Lift them out, dish them quickly, and serve with white mushroom sauce, bread sauce, game gravy, or celery sauce.

  4. For serving, add a slice of fresh butter, 1 tablespoon of lemon juice, and a sprinkle of cayenne in a hot dish under the partridges.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 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

Partridges
Provide the lean, delicate meat that is cooked through in simmering water.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the warm birds as it melts.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mild, rich flavour of the game.
Cayenne pepper
Adds a gentle heat that lifts the savoury flavour of the meat.

The step that matters

Boil for 15 to 18 minutes until cooked through. Boiling is gentle but timing matters: undercooked poultry risks food safety, while overcooking toughens the lean meat and dries it out. Check that the birds are cooked through before lifting them out.

“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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