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Partridge Pudding

A pudding made with partridges, prime steak, gravy, and optional forcemeat balls, cooked by boiling or steaming.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Partridge Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the partridges by picking, drawing, and singeing them.

  2. If unsure of their freshness, skin the partridges.

  3. Cut the partridges into neat joints and optionally fry them in clarified butter.

  4. Cut the steak into strips and line a pudding basin with a suet or butter crust, about ½ inch thick.

Fill and cook

  1. Place steak at the bottom and top of the basin, with partridge joints in the middle.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and cayenne, or add mushrooms or truffles if desired.

  3. Add 1½ cups of good gravy made from the trimmings of the birds and steak, using brown stock as a base.

  4. Cover and cook the pudding by boiling for 3 to 3½ hours or steaming for 4 hours.

  5. After cooking, cut a hole in the top and add more gravy.

  6. Wine can be added if desired.

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. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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, whose lean flesh becomes tender during long gentle cooking.
Prime steak
Adds rich beefy flavour and juices that enrich the gravy and meat inside the crust.
Suet or butter crust
Forms the enclosing pastry that holds the filling and keeps it moist while steaming.
Good gravy
Supplies moisture and savoury depth so the filling stays juicy rather than dry.
Clarified butter
Fat for frying the partridge joints, adding browning and a rich, nutty flavour.

The step that matters

Cover and cook the pudding by boiling or steaming. The long, gentle cooking is needed to tenderise the meat and set the crust. Too fast or too hot a heat can toughen the meat and leave the pastry under-cooked or soggy, so keep the water at a steady simmer and the basin well sealed.

“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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