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A Salmi of Pheasants or Partridges

A stew of roasted pheasants or partridges simmered in veal gravy with onions, bay leaf, mace, peppercorns, cayenne, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

A Salmi of Pheasants or Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the game

  1. Carve the game neatly and remove all skin and fat from the legs, wings, and breasts.

  2. Bruise the bodies and place them in a clean stew-pan with the skin and trimmings.

  3. Add the sliced onions, bay leaf, mace, and peppercorns.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour in the veal gravy or broth and boil briskly until reduced by half.

  2. Strain the gravy, pressing the bones to extract flavor, and skim off the fat.

  3. Add cayenne and lemon juice to the strained gravy.

Heat and serve

  1. Heat the game gradually in the sauce without boiling.

  2. Arrange fried bread around a dish, place the game in the center, and pour the sauce over it.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Game birds (pheasant or partridge)
Provides the tender meat that forms the body of the stew.
Veal gravy or strong broth
Forms the rich liquid base that reduces into a concentrated, flavorful sauce.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the gravy as it simmers.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the game gradually in the sauce without boiling. Boiling toughens muscle proteins and makes lean game meat dry and stringy, so gentle heating keeps it tender.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pheasant, onion, veal, pepper, lemon, bread. 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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