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Roast Partridges

Roasted partridges served with fried breadcrumb garnish, gravy, and bread sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Roast Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the birds

  1. Hang the partridges before a brisk fire.

Roast

  1. Baste constantly with butter, using ¼ pound for 2 birds.

  2. Roast for about 18 minutes.

Make the bread sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine ¼ pound of bread crumbs, 1 clove, 2 allspice, 3 shallots, and ¾ pint of milk; boil and stir for 15 minutes, then strain through a sieve.

  2. Return the sauce to the saucepan, add 2 tablespoons of thick cream or 1 ounce of fresh butter, and boil for 2 minutes before serving.

Make the gravy and crumbs

  1. In another saucepan, combine 1 pint of stock, 1 teaspoon soy sauce, 1 tablespoon Harvey sauce, 1 tablespoon flour, ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt, ¼ teaspoon mustard powder, and a grain of cayenne; boil uncovered until reduced by one-third (about 20 minutes).

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of port wine, strain, and serve.

  3. Fry 3 ounces of bread crumbs in 1½ ounces of butter over gentle heat until pale yellow‑brown; drain on a sieve.

  4. Garnish with fried crumbs and serve with gravy and bread 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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Allspice + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together386 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Provide the main meat, which is cooked by roasting before the gravy and sauces are served.
Butter
Bastes the birds for browning and moisture, and enriches the fried crumbs.
Bread crumbs
Thicken the milk into a bread sauce and, fried, give a crisp garnish.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the bread sauce, which thickens as the crumbs soften.
Stock
Forms the base of the gravy, concentrated by reduction for flavour.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it reduces.

The step that matters

Basting the birds constantly. Frequent basting spreads melted butter over the skin, helping it brown evenly and keeping the lean meat from drying out during roasting.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, bread, clove, shallot, milk, cream, sauce):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, clove, shallot, milk, cream, sauce. 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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