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Salmis of Pheasant

A sauce made from pheasant skin, stock, butter, flour, sherry, and gravy, served over pheasant joints.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Salmis of Pheasant

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Remove the skin from the pheasant and place the skin and bones in a stewpan.

  2. Add 1 pint of stock and bring to a boil for 1 hour, then strain the mixture.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate stewpan, melt butter and add flour until browned.

  2. Stir in ⅓ cup of sherry and prepared gravy.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  4. When hot, add the joints of pheasant but do not let them boil.

Serve

  1. Serve with the sauce poured over the pheasant and garnish with fried sippets.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Pheasant + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together225 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Flour and butter 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

Cold roast pheasant
Provides the meat, which is gently reheated in the sauce without boiling so it stays tender.
Flour
Thickens the sauce with butter and, once browned, adds a nutty, toasted flavour.
Butter
Carries the flour for browning and adds richness to the sauce.
Sherry
Adds acidity and a deeper, wine-based aroma to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens and balances the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Do not let the pheasant boil. Boiling toughens the proteins in cooked meat, making it dry and stringy. Keeping the sauce just hot lets the joints warm through while staying tender.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, flour, butter, sherry, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Raisinfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, flour, butter, sherry, pepper. 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.

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