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To Roast the Pintail or Sea Pheasant

A roasted pintail or sea pheasant seasoned with butter, cayenne pepper, and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pheasant and pepper work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 462 recipes. Both carry sabinene, which smells woody, terpenic. The science ↓

To Roast the Pintail or Sea Pheasant

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.

Prepare

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

Roast

  1. Flour the bird well and place it on a spit over a clear, brisk fire.

  2. Baste constantly with butter while roasting for 25 to 30 minutes.

  3. After roasting, let it rest before carving.

Finish and serve

  1. Score the breast and sprinkle with cayenne and coarse sea salt before serving.

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. Pheasant + peppertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together462 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  2. Pheasant + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together511 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pintail or sea pheasant
Is the main bird, providing the meat that is roasted and carved.
Butter
Basting fat that adds richness and helps the skin brown as it roasts.
Cayenne pepper
Adds a sharp, warm heat to the surface of the cooked bird.

The step that matters

Basting constantly with butter. Frequent basting keeps the surface moist and carries heat across the skin, which helps it brown evenly rather than drying out or scorching in patches.

“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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