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To Roast Partridges

Roasted partridges served with bread sauce and povcrroy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,081 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Roast Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Roast and baste

  1. Roast the partridges until nicely cooked, but not overdone.

  2. Baste them gently with butter and dust with flour.

  3. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and froth them up.

Make the bread sauce

  1. Prepare the bread sauce by boiling bread crumbs in milk with the whole onion, white pepper, salt, and a bit of butter.

  2. Remove the onion and beat the mixture well.

Make the povcrroy sauce

  1. For the povcrroy sauce, chop the shallots finely and boil with gravy, vinegar, pepper, and salt for one minute.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauces in separate dishes.

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. Flour + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Onion + shallottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Main lean meat that becomes dry and tough if cooked past done.
Butter
Enriches the birds with fat, adding moisture and helping the skin brown.
Flour
Dusted on the birds to help the surface brown and form a light coating.
Bread crumbs
Soak up milk and swell to thicken the bread sauce to a smooth, soft body.
Milk
Liquid that softens the crumbs and gives the bread sauce its creamy texture.
Vinegar
Adds sharpness that balances the rich gravy in the sauce.

The step that matters

Roasting the partridges. Partridge is very lean, so even a few extra minutes past done dries the meat. Pulling the birds when just cooked keeps them moist and tender.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, bread, milk, onion, sauce, shallot. 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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