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Broiled Grouse

Broiled grouse larded with fat salt pork, seasoned with salt and pepper, served on toasted bread or fried hominy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Broiled Grouse

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Singe, clean, and wipe the grouse well.

  2. Split the grouse down the back and lard the breasts with narrow strips of fat salt pork.

  3. If the grouse is tough, steam for 30 minutes and marinate in lemon juice and oil until cold.

Broil and serve

  1. Season with salt and pepper, then broil for 15 minutes.

  2. Serve on squares of toasted bread or fried hominy, and butter well before serving.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Grouse
Is the main meat, cooked whole after splitting so it cooks evenly under the broiler.
Fat salt pork
Strips larded into the breasts melt during broiling, adding moisture and richness to the lean meat.
Lemon juice
Acidity in the marinade helps tenderise tough meat and brightens the flavour.
Butter
Added before serving, it adds fat, richness and a glossy finish.

The step that matters

Steaming and marinating tough grouse. Grouse is a lean, gamey bird that can be tough. Steaming softens the muscle fibres and the acidic marinade further tenderises the meat, so the cook should only steam when the bird is tough and let it chill fully in the marinade before broiling.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, bread, 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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