Skip to main content
Main

To Roast a Pheasant

A pheasant roasted with flour, butter, bread sauce, and brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Roast a Pheasant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bird

  1. Pluck the feathers from the pheasant carefully.

  2. Cut a slit in the back of the neck to remove the crop and draw the bird.

  3. Wipe the inside with a damp cloth and the outside with a dry cloth.

  4. Cut off the toes and position the head under the wing with the bill along the breast.

  5. Skewer the legs without crossing them and flour the pheasant well.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast over a brisk fire, basting constantly with well-flavored butter.

  2. Serve with bread sauce and good brown gravy.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  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 + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Pheasant + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together239 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Pheasant
Is the main meat, cooked whole so it stays moist and tender under dry heat.
Flour
Coats the skin so it browns and crisps during roasting.
Well-flavored butter
Basting fat that carries flavor into the meat and helps the skin brown.
Bread sauce
Adds a soft, moist, mildly savory accompaniment that balances the lean meat.
Brown gravy
Adds moisture and savory depth to the carved meat and its juices.

The step that matters

Basting constantly over a brisk fire. Pheasant is very lean, so it dries out quickly. Frequent basting with butter keeps the surface moist and helps the skin brown evenly, while a brisk fire cooks it fast enough to avoid drying the meat.

“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.

More roasted pheasant recipes

and Partridge 4with Mushrooms 3 See all 50 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes