Skip to main content
Main

To Roast the Pintail, or Sea Pheasant

A roasted pintail or sea pheasant, dusted with flour, basted with butter, seasoned with cayenne and sea salt, served with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

To Roast the Pintail, or Sea Pheasant

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare and roast

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Dust the pheasant with flour and place it on a spit over a clear, hot fire.

  3. Turn the bird frequently and baste it with butter almost continuously.

  4. Roast for 25 to 30 minutes, then remove from the spit.

Rest and serve

  1. Let it rest in front of the fire for 2 to 3 minutes to enhance the gravy.

  2. Carve the breast, sprinkle with cayenne and coarse sea salt, and serve with lemon.

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

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

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Pintail or sea pheasant
Provides the lean meat that is roasted and carved as the main dish.
Flour
Dusted on the bird to help form a light coating that promotes browning.
Butter
Basted over the bird to add moisture, richness and golden browning.

The step that matters

Basting the bird with butter almost continuously. Lean game meat dries out easily over a hot fire. Frequent basting adds fat and moisture to the surface, keeping the meat juicy and helping the skin brown evenly.

“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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesPheasant SoupPheasant Soup25 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes