Skip to main content
Main

Plovers, Stewed

A stew of plovers filled with a mixture of beef suet, chestnuts, egg yolks, and artichoke bottoms, cooked in brown gravy and port.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chestnut and artichoke share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Plovers, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the birds

  1. Mince the trail and mix with beef suet, chestnuts, egg yolks, and artichoke bottoms.

  2. Season the mixture with pepper and salt, then fill the plovers with it and truss them.

Stew

  1. Place the plovers in a stewpan and pour over the brown gravy and port or claret.

  2. Add lemon juice, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, mushrooms (or mushroom ketchup), and additional seasoning if needed.

  3. Cover the saucepan and stew gently for 30 minutes.

Thicken and serve

  1. Remove the plovers and place them on a hot dish.

  2. Strain the gravy and thicken it with brown thickening or a flour-butter paste.

  3. Pour the gravy around the plovers and garnish with hard-boiled plovers' eggs, cut into quarters.

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. Chestnut + artichoketop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  5. Artichoke + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together636 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Plovers
The main protein, cooked whole so the stuffing and gravy flavour the meat as it stews.
Beef suet
Adds richness and moisture to the stuffing, keeping it from drying out during gentle stewing.
Egg yolks
Bind the stuffing so it holds together when filled into the birds.
Brown gravy
Provides the liquid that cooks the birds slowly and forms the base of the sauce.
Port or claret
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the gravy as it reduces during stewing.
Brown thickening
Thickens the strained gravy so it coats the birds rather than running thin.

The step that matters

Stewing gently with the lid on. A gentle simmer keeps the lean bird meat tender and moist. Boiling vigorously toughens the proteins and can break the stuffing apart.

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, egg, artichoke, lemon, parsley, thyme, mushroom):

  1. Chickpeafits about as well
  2. Lentilsfits about as well
  3. Chestnutthe original
  4. Beansfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, egg, artichoke, lemon, parsley, thyme, 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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes