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Soiled Partridges

Partridges boiled and served with butter, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Soiled Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Strip off the feathers from the partridges and clean them well.

  2. Cut off the heads and truss them like boiled fowls.

Boil and serve

  1. Drop the trussed partridges into a large pan of boiling water.

  2. Add a little coarse sea salt and cook for 15 to 18 minutes.

  3. Lift them out, dish them quickly, and serve with a slice of fresh butter, lemon juice, and a sprinkling of cayenne pepper.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Partridges
Provide the lean meat that is cooked gently in water until tender.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the plain boiled meat when served.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mild flavour of the boiled birds.

The step that matters

Cook for 15 to 18 minutes. Boiling is gentle but a long cook dries out lean game birds and toughens the meat. Pulling them from the water once they are just cooked keeps the flesh moist and tender.

“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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