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Partridges with Mushrooms

Partridges stuffed with sautéed mushrooms, butter, salt, cayenne, and optional mace, roasted and served with brown mushroom sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Partridges with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Melt the butter in a pan over low heat.

  2. Add the mushrooms, salt, and cayenne; simmer for 8 to 10 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and let cool.

Stuff and roast

  1. Stuff the cooled mushrooms into the bodies of the partridges and sew them up.

  2. Truss the partridges securely and roast them on a spit or vertical jack for 30 to 40 minutes.

  3. Serve with brown mushroom sauce or 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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + macetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 recipes

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

  3. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Butter and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 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

Partridges
Form the main meat that is roasted and carved for the dish.
Mushroom buttons or small flaps
Provide moisture and savoury flavour to the stuffing as they cook in butter.
Butter
Carries flavour and adds richness to the mushrooms and helps them soften.

The step that matters

Let the mushroom filling cool before stuffing. Hot filling can speed bacterial growth and steam the inside of the birds, so it should be cooled before it goes into the partridges.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter. 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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