Skip to main content
Main

Pheasants and Partridges

Roasted pheasants or partridges served with a gravy made from mutton, lemon pickle, ketchup, browning sauce, sugar, butter, red wine, spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Pheasants and Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the birds

  1. Preheat oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Spit the pheasants or partridges and dust them with flour.

Roast

  1. Baste them often with fresh butter while keeping them at a distance from the fire.

  2. Roast for about 30 minutes.

Make the gravy

  1. For the gravy, place the scrag of mutton in a saucepan.

  2. Add lemon pickle, ketchup, and browning sauce to the saucepan.

  3. In a frying pan, mix sugar and butter over a clear fire until frothy.

  4. Pour in the red wine and stir well.

  5. Add Jamaica pepper, cloves, mace, and salt, and simmer for about 10 minutes.

  6. Strain the gravy and set aside.

Serve

  1. Serve the roasted birds with the gravy and garnish with a feather.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Ketchup + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Pheasants or partridges
Form the main dish; their meat is cooked by roasting and basted for moisture.
Fresh butter
Adds fat for basting, helping the birds brown and stay moist.
Sugar
Caramelises with butter in the frying pan, adding sweetness and colour to the gravy.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the gravy as it simmers.
Scrag of mutton
Gives the gravy a rich meaty base as it cooks in the saucepan.

The step that matters

Strain the gravy and set aside. Straining removes the cloves, mace and other solids so the gravy is smooth. Sugar and butter should be cooked only until frothy, since over-browned sugar turns bitter.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, flour, butter, mutton, ketchup, sauce, sugar):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Red currantfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, flour, butter, mutton, ketchup, sauce, sugar. 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

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipesMutton SoupMutton Soup56 recipes