Name: Pheasants and Partridges
Ingredients: 1 pheasant or partridge; coarse sea salt; black pepper; butter; fat bacon; packthread

Why it works: Pheasant and pepper work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 462 recipes. Both carry sabinene, which smells woody, terpenic. The science ↓

Pheasants and Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Pick and singe the bird. Cut a slit in the back of the neck and remove the crop without breaking it.
Cut off the vent and draw out the insides. Wipe clean and season with a little pepper, salt, and butter.
Truss the bird by cutting off the pinion at the first joint. Break the backbone and press the legs close to the body.
Turn the bird on its breast and skewer through the pinion, leg, body, and leg on the other side, securing the head at the end of the skewer.
Lay a bard of fat bacon over the breast and tie it on with packthread.

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.

Pheasant + peppertop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together462 recipes

Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).
Pheasant + buttertop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together511 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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