Skip to main content
Main

Three Partridges À LA Beshemell

A dish of partridges wrapped in pastry, filled with minced meat and Besheml sauce, topped with breadcrumbs and clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Three Partridges À LA Beshemell

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the breasts from the partridges without breaking the back or separating the legs.

  2. Wrap the breasts in pastry as you would for a fowl à la Besheml.

  3. Bake the pastry until it is a nice color.

Fill and finish

  1. Mince the breast meat and mix with hot Besheml sauce, lemon juice, garlic or shallot vinegar, pepper, salt, and sugar.

  2. Fill the partridges with the minced mixture.

  3. Top with bread crumbs and brush with clarified butter.

  4. Keep them hot in the oven and brown with a salamander before serving on a napkin.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Lemon + garlictop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,893 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Garlic + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together767 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Provide the lean meat that forms the main body of the dish.
Pastry
Encloses the breasts and bakes to a golden, crisp outer layer.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savory filling.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp topping that browns under the salamander.
Clarified butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the topping brown evenly.

The step that matters

Browning with the salamander. Lean meat dries out with prolonged heat, so the birds should be kept hot only as needed. The crumbs still need enough intense heat to turn golden and crisp.

Swap the garlic

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, pepper, sugar, bread, butter. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes