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A Salmi of Moor Fowl, Pheasants, or Partridges

A stew of roasted game with shallots, bay leaf, mace, peppercorns, veal gravy, cayenne, and lemon juice, served over fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

A Salmi of Moor Fowl, Pheasants, or Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the game

  1. Carve the game neatly.

  2. Remove all skin and fat from the legs, wings, and breasts.

  3. Bruise the bodies.

  4. Place them in a clean stewpan with the skin and trimmings.

Make the sauce

  1. Add shallots, bay leaf, mace, and peppercorns.

  2. Pour in the veal gravy or broth.

  3. Boil briskly until reduced by half.

  4. Strain the gravy.

  5. Press the bones to extract flavor.

  6. Skim off the fat.

  7. Add cayenne and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Heat the game gradually in the sauce without boiling.

  2. Arrange fried bread around a dish.

  3. Place the game in the center.

  4. Boil the sauce.

  5. Pour it over the game.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Pheasant + shallottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together89 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

  4. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

  5. Shallot + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,245 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal gravy or strong broth
Provides the liquid base and savory body that the sauce is built on.
Shallots
Add aromatic flavor to the sauce as it simmers and reduces.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, meaty sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the game gradually in the sauce without boiling. Boiling toughens meat proteins and dries the flesh, so gentle heating keeps the cooked game tender and moist.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, shallot, veal, pepper, lemon, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, shallot, veal, pepper, lemon, bread. 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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