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Pheasant Pte

A pheasant stuffed with partridge meat, chutney, butter, baked in pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Pheasant Pte

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. Prepare the pheasant by singeing and drawing it.

  2. Extract the gall from the liver and pound it in a mortar with the partridge meat, chutney, and butter.

  3. Stuff the mixture inside the pheasant and baste it with butter.

Roast

  1. Roast the pheasant for 15 minutes in a 400°F (200°C) oven.

  2. Let it cool, then sprinkle with salt and cut it up.

Assemble and bake

  1. Add pepper and place it in a pie dish lined with crust.

  2. Pour over gravy made by boiling down the remaining partridge.

  3. Cover with another crust and bake for 1 hour at 350°F (175°C).

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. Pheasant + peppertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together462 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  2. Pheasant + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together511 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. 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

Pheasant
Forms the main meat of the pie, providing the bulk and savoury flavour.
Partridge breast
Pounded into the stuffing, it adds moisture and body to the filling.
Bengal chutney
Adds sweet and sour notes that balance the rich meat and butter.
Butter
Adds fat that keeps the lean game moist and richly flavoured.
Pie crust
Encloses the meat, holding the filling and gravy together as it bakes.
Gravy made from partridge
Adds liquid that moistens the meat and fills the pie during baking.

The step that matters

Roast the pheasant for 15 minutes. The pheasant is only partly cooked before the pie bakes for an hour. Lean game meat dries out easily, so the short roast and the cooling step should be timed carefully to keep it juicy.

“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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