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To Boil a Pheasant

A boiled pheasant served with a celery and cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,467 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Boil a Pheasant

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the pheasant

  1. Boil a fine pheasant in a large pot of water, keeping it at a rolling boil.

  2. Cook a small pheasant for 30 minutes and a large one for 45 minutes.

Make the celery sauce

  1. In a separate pan, stew the chopped celery until tender, ensuring some liquid remains.

  2. Thicken the celery with heavy cream and a mixture of butter and flour.

Serve

  1. Remove the pheasant from the pot and pour the sauce over it.

  2. Garnish with lemon and season with coarse sea salt to taste.

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. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Celery + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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
Provides the main meat, which cooks through in the boiling water.
Celery
Softens into the base of the sauce and adds its own savory flavor.
Heavy cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor, and combines with flour to form a roux.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter.

The step that matters

Thicken the celery with heavy cream and a mixture of butter and flour. Flour needs to be cooked in fat before liquid is added, or it stays grainy and tastes raw. Adding the cream gradually while stirring keeps the sauce smooth and lets it thicken evenly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, celery, cream, butter, flour):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Avocadofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, celery, cream, butter, flour. 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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