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To Boil Partridges

A boiled partridges dish with pork, parsley, butter, and bread sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 Boil Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the feet of the partridges and tie down the legs closely.

Boil

  1. Boil the piece of pork for 1 hour.

  2. After 1 hour, add the partridges and boil for 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with parsley and butter or bread sauce.

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

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

  2. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

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

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender and moist as they simmer.
Pork
Simmers first to flavour the cooking liquid that the partridges then cook in.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the served birds.
Bread sauce
Adds moisture and a creamy, mild texture alongside the lean meat.

The step that matters

Adding the partridges after the pork has boiled for 1 hour. Partridges are small and cook quickly, so they need only about 20 minutes. Boiling them longer toughens the muscle fibres and dries the meat.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, butter, bread, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Sagefits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, butter, bread, sauce. 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.

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