Skip to main content
Main

Partridge Pie

A pie filled with partridges, bacon, parsley, mushrooms, and gravy, finished with orange juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 680 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Partridge Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Pound the livers of the partridges, fat bacon, and parsley in a mortar.

  2. Lay part of this mixture at the bottom of a pie crust.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the partridges in the crust, add the remaining forcemeat and mushrooms.

  2. Top with slices of fat bacon and cover with a lid of crust.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 2.5 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Before serving, remove the lid, take out the bacon, and add rich gravy and orange juice.

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. Parsley + orangetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together680 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Parsley + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,132 recipes

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

  3. Mushroom + orangetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together224 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (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 cooks through slowly inside the sealed crust.
Fat bacon
Adds fat and moisture, basting the meat and flavouring the forcemeat as it renders.
Mushrooms
Add moisture and earthy flavour to the filling as they release juices while baking.
Rich gravy
Adds moisture and savoury depth to the pie just before serving.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and a bright citrus note that balances the rich meat and fat.

The step that matters

Adding the gravy and orange juice after baking. The filling is already cooked through, so the liquids are added at the end to keep the pie moist and bright without overcooking or thinning the forcemeat during the long bake.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, mushroom):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, mushroom. 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

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes