Skip to main content
Main

To Roast Partridges

Roasted partridges served with bread sauce and brown gravy, seasoned with salt and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mushroom and shallot are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,982 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

To Roast Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the birds

  1. Hang the partridges until they can be kept without becoming offensive.

  2. Pick, draw, and singe the birds, then wipe the insides with a clean cloth.

  3. Truss the partridges with the head under the wing and legs drawn close together.

Roast and serve

  1. Flour the birds and place them over the fire, basting with butter frequently.

  2. Serve with bread sauce and pour a little brown gravy over them.

Make the gravy

  1. For a superior gravy, boil the remains of a cold roasted partridge with enough water or broth to make gravy.

  2. Season the gravy with salt, cayenne, and optional mushrooms, shallot, and herbs.

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. Mushroom + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Bread + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Provide the main meat, which is roasted whole and carved for serving.
Butter
Bastes the birds, adding fat that carries flavor and promotes gentle browning.
Mushrooms
Optional addition to the gravy, adding earthy savoriness.

The step that matters

Basting the birds with butter over the fire. Frequent basting keeps the surface moist and spreads fat over the skin, which helps it brown evenly and prevents the lean meat from drying out during roasting.

Swap the shallot

The recipe marks shallot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, bread, sauce, pepper, mushroom):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Shallotthe original
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Asparagusfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, sauce, pepper, mushroom. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipes