Name: Pheasant
Ingredients: 1 pheasant; ½ lemon; cayenne pepper; coarse sea salt; 1 glass old port

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Pheasant

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the legs by inserting a knife between the leg and body.
Take off the wings, leaving some breast meat attached.
Carve the breast into nice slices.
Serve the breast first, followed by the wings and legs.
Pour hot old port over the carved breast.
Squeeze half a lemon seasoned with cayenne and salt over the slices before serving.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Pheasant + peppertop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together462 recipes

Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).
Pheasant + lemontop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together163 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).