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Pheasants and Cabbage

A stew of pheasants cooked with cabbage, carrots, turnips, and bacon, finished with Spanish sauce or game flavour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pheasants and Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Blanch the cabbages, cool them, and cut them in halves.

  2. Remove the stems and fibers, season with salt and pepper, and tie into bundles.

Braise

  1. Line a stewpan with bacon fat, add butter, and moisten with consommé.

  2. Boil the cabbages for 20 minutes.

  3. Add the trussed pheasants, covering them with cabbage.

  4. Top with bacon fat and buttered paper, then simmer gently for 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Remove the cabbages, drain, and cut into short pieces to arrange around the pheasants.

  2. Garnish with glazed carrots, turnips, and bacon, and mask with Spanish sauce or game flavour.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Cabbage + carrottop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,505 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

White cabbages
Hold the pheasants and absorb the rich braising liquid, becoming tender and flavourful.
Pheasants
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Bacon fat
Adds savoury richness and flavour to the stewpan and the cabbage layer.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the braising liquid.
Consommé
Forms the moist braising liquid that cooks and flavours the dish.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 1.5 hours. A gentle simmer keeps the pheasant meat tender and the liquid clear. A hard boil toughens muscle proteins and can break up the cabbage.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, pheasant, carrot, turnip, sauce):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, pheasant, carrot, turnip, sauce. 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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