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To Roast Pheasants

A dish of pheasants roasted with bacon, flour, butter, served with gravy and bread sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Roast Pheasants

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the pheasants by drawing and singeing them.

  2. Lard one pheasant with bacon and leave the other unlarded.

Roast

  1. Spit the pheasants and roast them until done.

  2. Cover the breast with paper while roasting.

Finish and serve

  1. When cooked, flour and baste with butter to create a froth.

  2. Serve with good gravy in the dish and bread sauce on the side.

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

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

  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. Pheasant + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together239 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Pheasants
Provide the main meat, which is roasted whole on a spit.
Bacon
Lards one pheasant, adding fat and savoury flavour as it roasts.
Flour
Dusted over the cooked birds to help form a golden, frothy coating with the butter.
Butter
Basted over the birds to add fat, richness and browning.

The step that matters

Flouring and basting to create a froth. Flour and butter must be applied once the birds are cooked, so the flour mixes with the fat and browns into a crisp froth rather than burning or going pasty during roasting.

“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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