Name: To Roast Wild Fowl
Ingredients: wild fowl; pepper; coarse sea salt; butter; lemon; onion; hot water; gravy; shallot sauce

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 ↓

To Roast Wild Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).
Season the wild fowl with pepper, coarse sea salt, and a piece of butter inside each bird.
To reduce any fishy taste, place an onion and hot water in the dripping pan and baste the fowl for the first 10 minutes.
Remove the dripping pan and baste the fowl constantly with butter.
When ready, serve the fowl with gravy underneath and a squeeze of lemon on the breast slices.
For woodcocks, snipes, and quails, roast them without drawing and serve on toast with butter only.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,523 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Onion + shallottop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,431 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Pepper + shallottop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, lemon, shallot, sauce):

Chivefits better
Kalefits better
Mustardfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, lemon, shallot, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.