Skip to main content
Main

Partridges Forced with Tarragon

Partridges stuffed with veal farce and served with a tarragon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tarragon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,399 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Partridges Forced with Tarragon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare veal farce and stuff it into the crops of the trussed partridges.

Cook

  1. Stew the partridges gently and covered until very tender.

  2. Drain the cooking liquid and place the partridges on a serving dish.

Finish

  1. Make a tarragon sauce and add blanched tarragon cut into diamond shapes.

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. Tarragon + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Veal + tarragontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together217 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Veal + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,049 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow, covered stewing.
Veal farce
Stuffs the birds and adds richness and moisture as they cook.
Tarragon
Adds its strong, fresh aniseed aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stew gently and covered until very tender. Low, gentle heat breaks down the connective tissue in the birds slowly, making them tender. Boiling hard toughens the meat and dries it out, so the birds may stay tough or lose moisture.

Swap the tarragon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, pepper):

  1. Sagefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Tarragonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper. 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

Veal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes