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Woodcock, Stuffed and Roasted

A roasted woodcock stuffed with minced trail, bacon, parsley, pepper, salt, and optional shallot, served with gravy and toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Woodcock, Stuffed and Roasted

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pluck and draw the woodcocks, removing the gizzards.

  2. Mince the trail finely and mix with the bacon, parsley, pepper, salt, and shallot if using.

  3. Stuff the woodcocks with the mixture.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast the woodcocks in the usual way.

  2. Serve with gravy in a tureen and the trail on toast around them.

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. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + shallottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Fat bacon
Melts during roasting, adding fat that moistens the lean birds and carries flavour.
Woodcocks
The main protein; the cooked meat forms the centre of the dish.

Swap the shallot

The recipe marks shallot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, pepper):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Shallotthe original
  4. Parsnipfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, 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.

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