Skip to main content
Main

Roast Partridges

Roast partridges are cooked in a covered roaster with water, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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. Pick and clean the partridges as you would chickens, then wash them quickly in cold water.

  2. Tie the legs and wings closely to the sides and place the birds in a covered roaster with ½ cup of water underneath.

  3. Rub the birds with butter and dredge with flour.

Roast and brown

  1. Cook for 30 minutes, then remove the cover and baste the birds with melted butter.

  2. Replace the cover and cook for an additional 15 minutes, then uncover and brown.

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).

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

Plump partridges
Provide the main meat, which cooks through during the covered roasting.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the skin brown and turn golden when basted.
Flour
Dredging coats the skin, which helps it brown and crisp in the oven.

The step that matters

Uncovering to brown after the covered cook. The lid traps steam that keeps the birds moist. Browning needs dry heat, so the cover must come off for the final stage to color the skin and set its surface.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes