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Partridges

Partridges filleted and stuffed with forcemeat, then poached, breaded, fried, and served with brown sauce and mushroom garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 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 ↓

Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the partridge

  1. Trim the fillets and place them in a frying pan with butter.

  2. Beat the fillets, trim them, and fix them together with a little forcemeat.

  3. Sprinkle salt and pepper over the fillets and add them to the frying pan.

  4. Lightly fry the fillets to color them, then drain.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the bones, carrots, turnips, onions, ham, sweet herbs, Madeira wine, and gravy; simmer for 30 minutes.

  2. Skim the fat, strain the liquid through a fine sieve, and use it to prepare a brown sauce.

Prepare the forcemeat

  1. Dust a surface with flour, shape the forcemeat into six pear-shaped portions, and flatten them.

  2. Butter a stewpan, add the forcemeat, pour in water, add a small lump of salt, and poach until cooked.

  3. Drain the forcemeat and let it cool, then dip in beaten egg and roll in breadcrumbs.

  4. Fry the forcemeat in warmed butter until browned on both sides.

Serve

  1. Arrange the fillets and forcemeat alternately on a hot dish, fill the center with minced mushrooms mixed with sauce, and serve.

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. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Provide the tender meat that forms the main body of the dish.
Forcemeat
Binds the fillets together and gives a soft, moist texture inside the crisp coating.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the fillets and forcemeat brown in the pan.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating on the forcemeat when fried.
Madeira wine
Adds sweetness and aroma to the stock used for the brown sauce.
Egg
Binds the breadcrumb coating so it adheres to the forcemeat.

The step that matters

Poach the forcemeat gently until just cooked. Forcemeat is a raw, finely ground mixture that sets as its proteins coagulate with heat. Boiling it hard can make it tough and crumbly, while under-cooking leaves it raw, so it should be poached in gently simmering water until firm.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, carrot, turnip, ham, madeira wine, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, carrot, turnip, ham, madeira wine, flour. 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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