Skip to main content
Main

Salmis of Pheasant, a LA Bourguignotte

A pheasant stew with sauce, mushrooms, truffles, onions, and quenelles, served warm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Shallot and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,476 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Salmis of Pheasant, a LA Bourguignotte

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pheasant

  1. Let the roasted pheasant cool, then cut it into pieces, removing the legs, cutting off the fillets with the pinion bones, and separating the breast from the back.

  2. Trim the pieces, cut them crosswise into halves, and place them in a stewpan.

Make the sauce

  1. Chop the trimmings and add them to the stewpan with shallots, bay leaf, thyme, peppercorns, mace, and butter.

  2. Fry the mixture over medium heat until slightly browned.

  3. Moisten with ½ cup of Claret or Burgundy and simmer until reduced by half.

  4. Add ½ cup of white consommé and simmer for 15 minutes.

  5. Strain the mixture through a sieve into a stewpan with enough Espagnole sauce.

  6. Clarify and reduce the sauce, then strain it again into a basin.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour one-third of the sauce over the pheasant pieces.

  2. In a bain-marie, warm the remaining sauce with button mushrooms, small truffles, glazed button onions, and quenelles.

  3. Before serving, warm the pheasant pieces without boiling them, then plate them.

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. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

  3. Mushroom + truffletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,900 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Thyme + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Roasted pheasant
Provides the main meat, which is cut into pieces and gently reheated in the sauce.
Claret or burgundy
Adds acidity and depth as it reduces, building the flavour of the sauce.
Espagnole sauce
Forms the body of the sauce, giving it richness and a thick, coating texture.
Butter
Adds fat and helps the trimmings and aromatics brown lightly at the start.
Shallots
Add a mild sweetness and aromatic depth to the sauce base.

The step that matters

Warming the pheasant without boiling. Boiling toughens the meat's proteins and makes it dry and stringy, so the pieces should be warmed gently in the sauce just before serving.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, shallot, thyme, butter, sauce, mushroom, truffle):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, shallot, thyme, butter, sauce, mushroom, truffle. 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

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesPheasant SoupPheasant Soup25 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes