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Roast Pheasant with Mushrooms

Roast pheasant stuffed with mushrooms, butter, salt, and cayenne, then baked and served with gravy and bread sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Roast Pheasant with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the pheasant as usual, then lard it along each side of the breast with small pieces of bacon.

  2. Wash and skin the mushrooms; cut large ones in halves or quarters.

  3. Stuff the pheasant with the mushrooms, adding 1 ounce of butter, salt, and cayenne.

  4. Truss the pheasant neatly and cover the breast with a thickly buttered piece of paper.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast for 30 minutes, basting several times.

  2. Remove the paper and roast for an additional 10 minutes.

  3. Serve with 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.

  1. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Pheasant + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. Pheasant + peppertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together462 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  5. Pheasant + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together511 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Pheasant
Is the main protein, cooked whole so its meat becomes tender and cooked through.
Mushrooms
Add moisture and savory flavour as they cook inside the bird.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the breast brown and stay moist.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour that keeps the lean breast moist during roasting.

The step that matters

Covering the breast with buttered paper. Lean breast meat dries out quickly in dry oven heat. The buttered paper shields it and adds fat, and removing it later lets the skin brown.

“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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