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Roasted Pheasant

Roasted pheasant with bacon, flour, butter, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Roasted Pheasant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and roast

  1. Pick and draw the pheasant, lard it with bacon, and spit it on a roasting spit.

  2. Roast until done, then flour and baste with butter.

Serve

  1. Remove from heat and pour good gravy into a dish.

  2. Serve with bread-sauce on the side.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pheasant + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together225 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  3. Pheasant + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together511 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Pheasant
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking to tender meat over the spit.
Bacon
Lardons the bird, adding fat that bastes the lean meat and keeps it moist.
Flour
Dusted over the roasting bird, it helps form a browned, crisp surface.
Butter
Basting fat that promotes browning and adds richness to the skin.

The step that matters

Roast until done. Pheasant is very lean, so overcooking dries the meat quickly. Checking doneness carefully and basting during roasting helps keep it juicy.

“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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