Skip to main content
Main

Curry of Old Cock-Pheasant

A curry made by stewing an old cock-pheasant with veal stuffing, beef suet, curry powder, and salt.

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

Why it works: Pheasant and beef work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 131 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Curry of Old Cock-Pheasant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Hang the cock-pheasant in the larder until ready to cook.

  2. Stuff the pheasant with veal stuffing and chopped beef suet.

  3. Season with curry powder and salt.

Cook

  1. Stew the pheasant until tender, allowing the flesh to fall off the bones.

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. Pheasant + beeftop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together131 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Veal + beeftop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Pheasant + vealtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together132 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

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

What each ingredient does

Cock-pheasant
Provides the main meat; an old bird is tough and needs long, slow cooking to soften.
Veal stuffing
Fills the cavity and adds savoury flavour and moisture to the bird as it cooks.
Beef suet
Adds fat that melts into the meat, keeping it moist and rich during stewing.
Curry powder
Gives the dish its spiced aroma and flavour.

The step that matters

Stew the pheasant until tender. An old bird's connective tissue only breaks down into gelatin with long, gentle simmering. Cooking too briefly or too hard leaves the meat tough and stringy, so keep it at a low simmer until the flesh pulls easily from the bones.

“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

Beef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes