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Roast Partridges

Roast partridges seasoned with salt and pepper, coated with bacon and butter, baked until cooked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Roast Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick and draw the partridges like chickens, then wipe them carefully inside and out.

  2. Tuck the wings back and fasten the legs to the sides with a small skewer.

  3. Lard the breasts thickly and place thin slices of bacon on top and inside the birds.

Roast

  1. Place the partridges in a baking pan and baste with butter initially.

  2. Dredge the partridges with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  3. Roast the partridges for one hour.

  4. Baste the partridges with their own gravy.

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. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Form the main body of the dish, cooking through as the centerpiece of the roast.
Butter
Adds fat for basting, promoting browning and a rich, moist surface.
Bacon
Adds fat that bastes the lean breast meat, keeping it moist and flavorful during roasting.

The step that matters

Lard the breasts thickly. Partridge breast is very lean and dries out quickly in the oven. Fat laid over and within the meat melts during roasting, keeping the flesh moist and tender.

“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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