Skip to main content
Main

Pheasant, Curried

A pheasant cooked in a curry sauce with stock, herbs, and rice flour, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Thyme and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,225 recipes. Both carry terpineol, which smells pine, woody. The science ↓

Pheasant, Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Joint the pheasant and trim the pieces.

  2. Boil the odds and ends with the stock.

Make the sauce

  1. Fry the joints with the onion and herbs until brown.

  2. Add the fried joints to the stock, reserving the rice flour.

  3. Pass everything through a fine sieve, placing the meat on a dish.

  4. Return the liquid to the pan, skim well, and add the rice flour.

  5. Boil and season with salt to taste, then pour over the pheasant.

Serve

  1. Serve with a border of rice.

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. Thyme + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

  2. Marjoram + basiltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together688 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

  3. Thyme + basiltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

  4. Marjoram + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together687 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Thyme + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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, whose juices and fat flavour the finished curry.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the curry flavour and becomes the sauce.
Curry paste
Supplies the spice blend that gives the dish its main aroma and warmth.
Rice flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce that coats the pheasant.
Onion
Browns during frying to add sweetness and a savoury base to the sauce.
Butter or curry fat
Adds fat that carries spice flavours and helps the joints brown.

The step that matters

Fry the joints with the onion and herbs until brown. Browning triggers the Maillard reaction, which builds deep savoury flavour. Pale joints give a flat, thin-tasting sauce once simmered in the stock.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, rice, flour, thyme, marjoram, basil, carrot):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, rice, flour, thyme, marjoram, basil, carrot. 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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesSteamed RiceSteamed Rice48 recipes