Skip to main content
Main

Roasting Game

Roasted game birds served with mutton gravy and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Roasting Game

Ingredients

Directions

Roast the birds

  1. Spit the birds and dust them with flour.

  2. Baste often with fresh butter, keeping them at a distance from the fire.

  3. Roast for about 30 minutes.

  4. Toast the round of bread until brown and place it under the birds.

  5. Baste the birds with butter and let the juices drop onto the toast.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. For gravy, cook a scrag of mutton in a saucepan with lemon pickle, ketchup, and browning.

  2. Strain the gravy and add a little to the dish with the birds.

  3. Once done, place the birds on the toast and pour in the gravy.

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

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

  2. Ketchup + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mutton + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,488 recipes

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

  5. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Woodcocks or snipes
Form the main dish, with their rich flesh cooked by spit-roasting.
Fresh butter
Basting fat that keeps the birds moist and promotes browning on the surface.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the dish.
Bread
Soaks up the drippings and juices, serving as a base beneath the birds.

The step that matters

Baste often with fresh butter at a distance from the fire. Frequent basting keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly. Keeping the birds away from direct heat prevents the outside from scorching before the inside cooks through.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, mutton, ketchup, bread, red wine, sugar):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Red currantfits better
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, mutton, ketchup, bread, red wine, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes