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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, and optional wine, served over fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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, removing all skin and fat from the legs, wings, and breasts.

  2. Bruise the bodies and place them in a clean stewpan with the skin and trimmings.

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

Make the sauce

  1. Pour in the veal gravy or broth and boil briskly until reduced by half.

  2. Strain the gravy, pressing the bones to extract flavor, and skim off the fat.

  3. Add cayenne and lemon juice, then heat the game gradually in the sauce without boiling.

  4. For a richer flavor, consider adding white wine to the broth.

Serve

  1. Arrange fried bread around a dish, place the game in the center, and pour the sauce over it.

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. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Shallot + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together881 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

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

What each ingredient does

Game meat
Provides the main savoury flavour and the body of the dish.
Veal gravy or broth
Forms the liquid base, and reducing it concentrates flavour and gives the sauce body.
Shallots
Add a mild, sweet aromatic depth to the sauce as they cook down.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the game gradually without boiling. Boiling toughens meat proteins and makes them dry and stringy, so the game should be warmed slowly in the sauce just until heated through.

Swap the mace

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

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

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