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To Cook a Partridge

A partridge cooked in salted water, browned in butter, and served on dry toast with parsley and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

To Cook a Partridge

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and dry the partridge.

Cook

  1. Boil the partridge in salted water for 30 minutes.

  2. Fry the partridge in a hot pan with plenty of butter until browned.

Serve

  1. Serve on slices of dry toast, garnished with parsley and currant jelly.

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 + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Parsley + curranttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Partridge
Provides the main meat, which is partly cooked by boiling and then browned in butter.
Butter
Fat that conducts heat in the hot pan and browns the partridge surface.
Dry toast
Gives a crisp base that holds the cooked partridge above the plate.

The step that matters

Fry the partridge in a hot pan until browned. A hot pan with enough butter lets the surface brown through the Maillard reaction, creating colour and savoury flavour. A cool or crowded pan steams the bird instead, leaving it pale and soft.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley. 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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