Skip to main content
Main

Blackcock, Stewed

A stewed blackcock served with gravy and toast snippets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Blackcock, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the bird

  1. Fry the jointed blackcock in plenty of butter until nicely browned, adding the clove of garlic.

  2. Remove the garlic before stewing.

Make the gravy and stew

  1. Add stock, port wine, salt, and pepper to the frying pan to make a gravy.

  2. Transfer the blackcock to a stew pan and pour the gravy over it.

  3. Simmer gently for about 30 minutes or until tender.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat on a dish with the gravy and toast snippets around it.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Clove + port winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together914 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Butter + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Blackcock
Provides the meat that becomes tender during the gentle stewing.
Butter
Fat that browns the meat, building savoury flavour before stewing.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to the gravy as it reduces with the stock.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the gravy that moistens the meat during stewing.

The step that matters

Brown the blackcock well in butter. Browning through the Maillard reaction creates deep savoury flavour that the gentle stew cannot add later. Pale meat results in a flat, washed-out gravy.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, clove, port wine, pepper):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, clove, port wine, pepper. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes