Name: Roast Pheasants, Partuidoks, Etc
Ingredients: 2 cleaned birds (pheasants or partuidoks); ½ cup raw oysters, chopped; ¼ teaspoon nutmeg; 1 beaten egg yolk; thin slices of pickled pork; butter for greasing paper

Why it works: Pheasant and pork work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 240 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Roast Pheasants, Partuidoks, Etc

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the stuffing

Chop the raw oysters, omitting the hard parts.
Mix the chopped oysters with salt and nutmeg.
Add the beaten egg yolk to bind the mixture.

Wrap and roast

Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).
Cover the birds with thin slices of pickled pork.
Wrap the birds tightly in buttered white paper.
Place them in a baking pan and roast in the oven.
Serve with oyster 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.

Pheasant + porktop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together240 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,184 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).
Oyster + porktop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,255 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).
Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,933 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,103 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Raw oysters: Provide a savoury, briny flavour that seasons the mixture.
Beaten egg yolk: Binds the chopped oysters into a cohesive mixture.
Pickled pork: Lays over the birds, adding salty, savoury flavour and fat as they roast.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, oyster, egg, pork, butter):

Nutmegthe original
Capersfits about as well
Thymefits about as well
Parsleyfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, oyster, egg, pork, butter. 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.