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Snipe Sauce

A sauce made from roasted snipe, veal gravy, red wine, orange juice, pepper, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,402 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Snipe Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Remove entrails and liver from the roasted snipe and chop them finely.

  2. In a small saucepan, combine veal gravy, red wine, pepper, and salt.

  3. Add the chopped entrails and liver to the saucepan and mash them together.

  4. Squeeze in the juice of the orange and thicken the sauce with flour.

Serve

  1. You can either pour the sauce into a dish and place the snipe on top or cut the snipe into pieces and mix them into the sauce 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. Pepper + orangetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  2. Red wine + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together288 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Red wine + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Veal + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,049 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Snipe
Provides the main meat and the entrails and liver that enrich the sauce.
Veal gravy
Forms the savory liquid base of the sauce.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the sauce.
Orange juice
Adds brightness and acidity that balances the rich gravy.
Flour
Thickens the sauce to give it body.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with flour. Flour must be cooked in the hot liquid long enough to swell and set, or the sauce stays thin or tastes raw and pasty. Stirring keeps it smooth and free of lumps.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, red wine, pepper, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, red wine, pepper, flour. 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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