Skip to main content
Main

Devilled Game

A spicy game dish with brains, mustard, wine, sugar, and lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Devilled Game

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Split the woodcock, snipe, wild duck, or any underdone game.

  2. Remove the brains when splitting the head and add the tail if using woodcock.

  3. Mix salt, cayenne pepper, curry powder, and wet with French mustard.

  4. Cover the birds inside and out with the mixture.

Make the sauce

  1. Make a paste with the brains, egg yolk, mace, lemon peel, and season with anchovies or ketchup.

  2. Add wine, cayenne pepper, sugar, and lemon or orange juice to the paste.

Cook and serve

  1. Roll butter in flour and place the birds and sauce in a metal dish over a lamp.

  2. Cover tightly and shake occasionally until most of the sauce is absorbed.

  3. Serve the dish warm.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Ketchup + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 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

Brains
Form the base of the paste, adding richness and body to the sauce.
Egg yolk
Binds the paste so it holds together and coats the birds.
Wine
Adds liquid that thins the sauce and is absorbed during gentle cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture, enriching the sauce as it cooks.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich flavours of the game and sauce.

The step that matters

Cover tightly and shake occasionally until most of the sauce is absorbed.. Gentle, covered heat over a lamp keeps the birds moist while the sauce reduces. Too much heat or an uncovered dish can dry or scorch the meat before the sauce is absorbed.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, mustard, egg, lemon, ketchup, wine, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, mustard, egg, lemon, ketchup, wine, sugar. 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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes