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To Roast the Pintail, or Sea Pheasant

A roasted pintail or sea pheasant dusted with flour, basted with butter, and seasoned with cayenne, sea salt, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 the Pintail, or Sea Pheasant

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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Dust the bird with flour.

  3. Place the bird on a spit over a clear, quick fire.

  4. Turn the bird briskly.

  5. Baste the bird with butter continuously.

  6. Roast the bird for 25 to 30 minutes.

Roast and rest

  1. Remove the bird from the spit.

  2. Let the bird rest before the fire for 2 to 3 minutes.

  3. Score the breast.

  4. Sprinkle the breast with cayenne pepper.

  5. Sprinkle the breast with coarse sea salt.

Serve

  1. Serve the bird with lemon.

  2. Serve the bird with brown gravy.

  3. Serve the bird with Christopher North’s sauce.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pheasant + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together225 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Pintail
Is the main meat, cooked whole over a fire on a spit.
Butter
Basting fat that moistens the surface and promotes golden browning.
Flour
Dusted on the bird, it helps the skin brown and crisp during roasting.

The step that matters

Baste the bird with butter continuously. Butter keeps the surface from drying out while it cooks over a fierce fire. Its milk solids brown and add flavour, but they can scorch if the fire is too hot, so the bird must be turned briskly and kept moving.

“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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