Skip to main content
Main

Ragout of Partridges

A ragout made from partridges, stock, butter, mushrooms, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

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

Ragout of Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut any cold partridge into small pieces or joints.

Make the stock

  1. Put the bones and leftover bodies in a saucepan and add the stock.

  2. Boil gently for one hour, then strain the mixture.

Brown the ingredients

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add the mushrooms to the butter and brown them, then set aside.

  3. Add the pieces of partridge to the stewpan to brown.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and savory in the ragout.
Mushrooms
Browning in butter develops savory, earthy flavor and concentrated aroma.
Butter
Fat that carries flavor and promotes browning of the meat and mushrooms.
Stock
Adds savory depth and liquid moisture to the ragout.

The step that matters

Browning the partridge pieces. Browning in hot butter builds color and savory flavor through the Maillard reaction. Wet or crowded pieces steam instead of browning, so they need dry surfaces and room in the pan.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Mangofits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mushroom, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes