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Three Partridges & LA Beshemell

Stuffed partridges served with a beshemell sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Three Partridges & LA Beshemell

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the partridges

  1. Remove the breasts from the partridges without breaking the back or separating the legs.

  2. Wrap the breasts in paste as you would for a fowl a la beshemell.

  3. Bake the wrapped partridges until nicely colored.

Fill and finish

  1. Mince the breast meat.

  2. Mix the minced meat with lemon juice, garlic, shallot vinegar, pepper, salt, and sugar.

  3. Fill the partridges with the minced mixture.

  4. Top the partridges with bread crumbs.

  5. Brush the partridges with clarified butter.

  6. Keep the partridges hot in the oven.

  7. Brown the partridges with a salamander before serving on a napkin.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Garlic + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  5. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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 whole with the breasts reserved for the filling.
Paste for wrapping
Encloses the birds during baking, holding in moisture and forming a protective crust.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden topping that browns under the salamander.
Clarified butter
Adds richness and promotes browning on the surface of the birds.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the minced breast filling.

The step that matters

Brown the partridges with a salamander before serving. Browning relies on surface heat and dry, fat-coated skin; overheating can dry the lean breast meat, so the birds should be kept warm and only briefly browned.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, shallot, vinegar, pepper, sugar, bread, butter):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, shallot, vinegar, pepper, sugar, bread, butter. 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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