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Roast Partridge

Roast partridges with bacon, butter, flour, and chip potatoes, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Roast Partridge

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the partridges for roasting.

  2. Pour butter or dripping over the partridges.

Roast

  1. Roast in front of a brisk fire for 15 minutes.

  2. Remove the fat bacon.

  3. Sprinkle the bacon with flour.

  4. Baste the bacon well.

  5. Return the bacon to the fire.

  6. Roast for another 10 minutes.

  7. Remove from the oven.

Plate and serve

  1. Take off the strings.

  2. Place the birds on a hot dish.

  3. Garnish with chip potatoes.

  4. Serve with gravy and either bread sauce or browned bread crumbs.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together434 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

Butter and flour 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

Partridges
Form the main body of the dish, cooked whole as the centrepiece.
Fat bacon
Lays over the birds to baste them, adding fat and moisture as it melts.
Butter or dripping
Adds fat that helps the birds brown and keeps the meat from drying out.
Flour
Sprinkled on the bacon to help it brown and thicken the pan juices.

The step that matters

Return the bacon to the fire. Basting and roasting with fat promote even browning and moisture retention; too little heat or fat can leave the lean birds dry.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, bread. 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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