Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Partridges and Truffles

A stew of partridges cooked with stock, truffles, sherry, herbs, onions, and mace, finished with a butter‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Truffle and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,209 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Stewed Partridges and Truffles

Ingredients

Directions

Braise the partridges

  1. Place the necks and gizzards of the partridges and any other poultry into a stew-pan.

  2. Add the stock, truffles, sherry wine, sweet herbs, onions, and mace.

  3. Cover the partridges with fat bacon and paper.

  4. Simmer gently on a slow stove for 1 hour until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. Remove the truffles, peel, and slice them.

  2. Strain the cooking liquid.

  3. Skim off the fat.

  4. Melt butter in a stew-pan.

  5. Add enough flour to absorb the liquid.

  6. Pour in the strained cooking liquid.

  7. Bring to a boil.

  8. Add the sliced truffles to the sauce.

Serve

  1. Dry the partridges with a cloth.

  2. Place them on a dish.

  3. Pour the sauce over them.

  4. Garnish with paste or croutons.

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. Truffle + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

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

  4. Sherry + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Partridges
Provide the main cooked meat, which becomes tender through slow simmering.
Truffles
Contribute a strong earthy aroma that flavours both the braising liquid and the sauce.
Stock
Forms the moist cooking liquid that gives the sauce its body and savoury flavour.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the braising liquid and sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and a rich, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid as the roux is formed.

The step that matters

Adding flour to the butter. Flour must be cooked with the melted butter and then combined with the liquid gradually; adding it too quickly or in the wrong proportion can leave lumps or a thin, pasty sauce.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (truffle, sherry, wine, onion, butter, flour):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against truffle, sherry, wine, onion, butter, flour. 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.

You might also like

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