Name: To Roast Pheasants
Ingredients: 2 pheasants; beef gravy; bread sauce

Why it works: Pheasant and beef work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 131 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

To Roast Pheasants

Ingredients

2 pheasants
beef gravy
bread sauce

Directions

Pick, singe, and draw the pheasants like fowls.
Truss them by twisting the head around one wing and turning both wings on the back.
Fix the legs on each side similarly to a roast fowl, leaving the feet on.
Serve with beef gravy and bread sauce.

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.

Pheasant + beeftop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together131 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,032 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
Pheasant + breadtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together239 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Pheasant + saucetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together290 recipes

Shared aroma: decanoic acid (soapy, waxy).
Bread + saucetop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,934 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).