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Pheasant Roast

A roasted pheasant served with a sauce of potatoes, onions, bread crumbs, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Pheasant Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Wash, pare, and peel the potatoes into ribbons, then fry them crisp in hot fat.

Make the gravy and sauce

  1. Make a gravy with Liebig, adding seasoning and the teaspoon of relish.

  2. Peel and boil the small onion until tender, then pour the cooking liquid over the bread crumbs.

  3. Season the crumbs with pepper and salt, add the blade of mace, and heat the sauce for a few minutes.

  4. Remove the mace and transfer the sauce to a tureen.

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. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Bread + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

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

  5. Bread + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together434 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Paring into ribbons and frying in hot fat gives them a crisp, golden exterior.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in the onion cooking liquid, they thicken the sauce and give it body.
Small onion
Boiled until tender, its cooking liquid adds savoury flavour to the sauce.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, bread, sauce, potato, onion, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, bread, sauce, potato, onion, pepper. 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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