Name: Slow-roast pheasant with apples and chestnuts
Yield: Serves 6
Cuisine: French
Ingredients: Salt and freshly ground pepper; About 100 ml crème fraîche or soured cream; Large nugget of unsalted butter; glass of dry cider or fresh apple juice; 4–5 tbsp fresh breadcrumbs; 2–3 thyme sprigs; 2 tbsp Calvados or any other apple brandy (even gin will do); 250 g red-skinned chestnuts (vacuum-packed or fresh); 50 g unsalted butter; 6 yellow-fleshed apples (Coxes, Reinettes or Golden Delicious); 2 pheasants, plucked and drawn

Preparation info

Serves
6

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

A Cook’s Year in a Welsh Farmhouse

By Elisabeth Luard

Published 2011

About

Make it easy for yourself, as they do in Provence, by shoving the birds in the oven and pouring yourself a glass of whatever makes you happy. The cooking method – gentle braising rather than roasting at a high heat – keeps the birds juicy and relieves the cook of all that basting. It works with any birds of similar size.

Ingredients

2 pheasants, plucked and drawn
6 yellow-fleshed apples (Coxes, Reinettes or Golden Delicious)
50

Method

Wipe the birds inside and out, pat dry, and singe off any stray feathers or tiny hairs.

Peel, core and roughly chop 2 apples. Heat half the butter in a small frying pan and fry the apple pieces till they take a little colour but are still firm. Stir in the chestnuts, sprinkle with the Calvados and bubble up briefly to evaporate the alcohol. Spoon the mixture inside the birds and bind th