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Roast Partridge

Roast partridges seasoned with coarse sea salt, butter, and fat salt pork, cooked over a moderately hot fire.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,933 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Roast Partridge

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the birds

  1. Pluck, draw, wash, and dry the partridges.

  2. Rub coarse sea salt inside and out.

Roast

  1. Place in a roasting pan with hot water and butter.

  2. Top each bird with a slice of fat salt pork.

  3. Baste often.

  4. Maintain a moderately hot fire.

  5. Roast for about 40 minutes, depending on size.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Transfer to a hot platter when done.

  2. Add stock and claret to the pan for gravy.

  3. Boil the gravy.

  4. Strain the gravy.

  5. Serve the gravy.

  6. Garnish with cresses or parsley.

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 + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Form the main meat of the dish, cooked whole and tender when roasted.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the birds brown in the pan.
Fat salt pork
Lays over the birds to baste them with fat as they roast, keeping the meat moist.

The step that matters

Maintain a moderately hot fire. If the heat is too low the birds dry out slowly, and if too high the outside burns before the inside cooks. Steady heat with regular basting keeps the meat juicy and evenly browned.

“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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