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Roast Grouse

Roast Grouse is a roasted game bird served on buttered toast with broth, garnished with watercress, fried breadcrumbs, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 469 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roast Grouse

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.

Roast

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

  2. Prepare the grouse as you would partridge, allowing less cooking time.

  3. Roast the grouse for about 25 minutes, or longer depending on size.

  4. Check if the meat is elastic under fork pressure; it should be undercooked.

Serve

  1. Dish the grouse on buttered toast moistened with broth.

  2. Garnish with watercress or fried breadcrumbs and parsley.

  3. Serve the sauce from the pan in a sauceboat.

  4. Serve with a salad.

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. Watercress + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Butter + watercresstop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Grouse
Provides the main lean meat that is roasted and served as the centrepiece.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the toast brown and taste savoury.
Broth
Moistens the toast so it soaks up juices and stays tender.
Slices of toast
Form a soft base that soaks up the cooking juices under the birds.

The step that matters

Check the doneness of the grouse. Game birds have very lean meat that dries out quickly, so they should be checked early and kept slightly undercooked. Fork pressure shows when the meat is springy, which signals it is still moist.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, watercress):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, watercress. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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