Name: Pheasants and Partridges
Ingredients: Pheasants or partridges; Coarse sea salt; Black pepper; Butter; Fat bacon; Packthread

Why it works: Pheasant and pepper work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 462 recipes. Both carry sabinene, which smells woody, terpenic. The science ↓

Pheasants and Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Pick and singe the birds, then cut a slit in the back of the neck and remove the crop without breaking it.
Cut off the vent and draw out the insides, wiping them well.
Season the insides with a little pepper, salt, and a bit of butter.
Truss the birds by cutting off the pinion at the first joint.
Break the backbone and truss them like a fowl, pressing the legs close to the apron.
Turn the birds on their breasts and run a skewer through the pinion, leg, body, and the other leg and pinion.
Fix the head on the end of the skewer and lay a bard of fat bacon over the breast, tying it on with packthread.

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.

Pheasant + peppertop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together462 recipes

Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).
Pheasant + buttertop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together511 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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