Skip to main content
Main

Roast Partridges

Roast partridges seasoned with pork fat, butter, flour, and hot water, served with a gravy made from drippings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Roast Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Lard the partridges well with fat pork.

  2. Tie the legs down to the rump, leaving the feet on.

Roast

  1. Baste the partridges well with butter while cooking.

  2. Cook for 25 to 30 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Put the drippings into a saucepan.

  2. Add a piece of butter the size of an egg, a little flour and hot water.

  3. Let it boil once.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Pork + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Lean game meat that is the main dish, cooked whole and kept tender by the fat around it.
Fat pork
Larding adds fat through the lean meat, helping it stay moist and adding savoury flavour during roasting.
Butter
Basting carries fat over the surface, adding richness and helping the skin brown and stay moist.
Flour
Thickens the pan drippings into a smooth sauce.
Hot water
Thins the drippings and flour into a pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Baste the partridges well with butter while they cook. Partridge is very lean and dries out quickly over heat. Regular basting coats the surface with fat, which helps keep the meat moist and promotes even browning.

“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

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes