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Roast Grouse

Roast Grouse is a dish where a grouse is cleaned, wrapped in corned ham, roasted with boiling water, then browned with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Roast Grouse

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the grouse and rinse it well with soda and water, then with pure water.

  2. Wipe the inside and outside of the grouse.

  3. Cover the grouse with thin slices of corned ham, using more fat than lean.

  4. Bind the ham onto the grouse with twine or tape.

Roast and brown

  1. Pour 1 cup of boiling water over the grouse and roast for 40 minutes, basting with the pan gravy three times.

  2. Remove the ham, wash the grouse with butter, dredge with flour, and brown it while making 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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Ham + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Ham + flourtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour 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

Grouse
Is the main meat, cooked whole so its flesh becomes tender and juicy as it roasts.
Corned ham
Its fat bastes the bird as it cooks, adding moisture and savory flavor to the lean meat.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the surface brown and gives a richer, rounder flavor.
Flour
Coats the surface so it browns further and thickens the pan gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the grouse after the ham is removed. Once the ham is off, the bird's surface is exposed and must be buttered and floured to brown well. Browning depends on dry surface sugars and proteins reacting with heat, so it can be left pale or dry if rushed.

“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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