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Roast Pheasant with Mushrooms

A pheasant roasted with a mushroom stuffing and served with a gravy made from the bird's drippings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Roast Pheasant with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pheasant

  1. Pluck, singe, draw, and lard the pheasant.

  2. Roughly chop the mushrooms and mix them with 2 ounces of butter, seasoning with salt and cayenne.

  3. Stuff the pheasant with the mushroom mixture, truss it, and cover it with thickly buttered paper.

Roast

  1. Roast the pheasant for about 40 minutes.

  2. Remove the paper and brown the pheasant.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. For the gravy, heat the remaining butter and fry the minced onion until brown.

  2. Add the flour and brown it, then add the chopped liver of the pheasant, salt, sugar, mustard, and stock.

  3. Boil, then simmer for 30 minutes, strain, and add the drippings from the pheasant.

  4. Serve the gravy in a tureen.

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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  3. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Add moisture and savoury flavour to the stuffing as they cook inside the bird.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the skin and paper-wrapped surface brown during roasting.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it browns with the butter and onion.
Made mustard
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the butter and drippings.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the gravy, carrying flavour from the liver and drippings.

The step that matters

Remove the paper and brown the pheasant. The buttered paper keeps the bird moist early on, so the surface needs enough time uncovered to brown. Browning is a dry-heat reaction that gives the roast its colour and flavour.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, mushroom, mustard, flour, butter, pepper, sugar. 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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