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Pheasant Sauté, with Truffles

A pheasant sautéed with truffles, ham, and aromatics, simmered in broth and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Pheasant Sauté, with Truffles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pheasant

  1. Singe and draw the pheasant, then cut off the legs and wings, and divide the breast into two pieces.

  2. Cut the back of the pheasant into pieces and place it in a stewpan with the neck, leg-bones, pinions, ham, chicken or veal trimmings, and sliced vegetables.

  3. Peel and slice the truffles, keeping them covered.

Brown and cook

  1. In a stewpan, add the legs with butter and half-fry them.

  2. Add the wings and breast, onion, parsley, and aromatics; season and fry on both sides.

  3. Cook slowly with hot ashes on the lid or place the stewpan at the entrance of the oven.

Make the sauce

  1. Fry the meats over high heat, sprinkle with flour, and moisten with broth and a little wine.

  2. Stir the sauce until it reaches a boil.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Pheasant + chickentop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together130 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Pheasant
Provides the main meat, which browns and becomes tender during slow cooking.
Butter
Adds fat for frying, helping the meat brown and carrying flavor.
Truffles
Add a strong earthy aroma to the finished dish.
Flour
Thickens the cooking juices into a sauce as it is moistened and heated.
Broth
Moistens the pan and forms the liquid base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the meats over high heat before adding liquid. Hot frying browns the meat surfaces through the Maillard reaction, building the deep flavor of the sauce. Pale, steamed meat gives a flat-tasting sauce.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pheasant, butter, onion, thyme, truffle, ham, chicken):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Celeryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, butter, onion, thyme, truffle, ham, chicken. 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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