Skip to main content
Main

Salmis of Pheasant, a LA Bourguignotte

A sauce for roasted pheasant made with shallots, herbs, wine, consommé, and Espagnole, finished with mushrooms, truffles, onions, and quenelles.

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.

  2. Cut it into pieces: remove the legs, cut off the fillets with pinion bones, separate the breast from the back, trim, and cut both crosswise into halves.

Make the sauce

  1. Chop the trimmings and place them in a stewpan with shallots, bay leaf, thyme, peppercorns, mace, and butter.

  2. Fry until slightly browned.

  3. Moisten with Claret or Burgundy and boil until reduced by half.

  4. Add white consommé and simmer for 15 minutes.

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

  6. Clarify and reduce the sauce.

  7. Strain through a tammy into a basin.

Finish and serve

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

  2. Keep the rest warm with mushrooms, truffles, onions, and quenelles.

  3. Warm the pheasant pieces without boiling.

  4. 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

Claret or burgundy
Adds acidity and wine flavour as it reduces into the sauce base.
Espagnole sauce
Gives the sauce body and a rich, thickened brown base.
Butter
Adds fat and helps the trimmings brown lightly for deeper flavour.
White consommé
Adds savoury liquid that extends the sauce and carries the flavour of the trimmings.

The step that matters

Warm the pheasant pieces without boiling. Boiling toughens the lean meat, making it dry and stringy, so the pieces should be heated gently in the sauce just until hot.

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