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Grouse Roasted with Bacon

Roasted grouse wrapped in corned ham or pork, basted with butter and water, served with a peppered lemon gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Grouse Roasted with Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bird

  1. Clean, truss, and stuff the grouse as usual.

  2. Cover the bird with thin slices of corned ham or pork, binding with buttered string.

Roast

  1. Roast for 45 minutes, basting with butter and water three times, then with the drippings.

Serve and make the gravy

  1. When done, serve with the ham around the bird.

  2. Skim the gravy, thicken with browned flour, season with pepper and lemon juice, and boil once.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Ham + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

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

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Grouse
Is the main protein, cooked whole so the meat stays moist under roasting.
Corned ham or pork
Wrapped over the bird, it adds salty, savoury flavour and fat that bastes the meat.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the skin brown during basting.
Browned flour
Thickens the gravy and adds a toasted, nutty colour and flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and balances its fattiness.

The step that matters

Basting the bird during roasting. Basting with butter, water and then drippings keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly. Skipping or spacing out the basting can leave the grouse dry.

“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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