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To Roast Pheasants

Roast pheasants larded with bacon, dusted with flour, basted with butter, served with gravy and bread sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Roast Pheasants

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Singe the pheasants and lard them with bacon, but not the other.

  2. Spit the pheasants and cover the breast with paper.

Roast and baste

  1. Roast until just done, then dust with flour and baste with butter.

  2. Allow a fine white froth to form, then remove from heat.

Serve

  1. Serve with good gravy in the dish and 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Pheasant + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together239 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

Pheasants
The lean meat that the bacon and butter help keep moist during roasting.
Bacon
Laid over the lean meat, its fat adds moisture and flavour as it cooks.
Butter
Basting with melted fat adds richness and encourages golden browning on the surface.
Flour
Dusted on the roasting bird, it helps the surface brown and crisp.

The step that matters

Roast until just done. Pheasant is very lean, so overcooking drives out moisture and leaves the meat dry and tough. Checking for doneness early and stopping at the right point keeps it tender and 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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