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Broiled Plovers

Broiled plovers seasoned with salt and pepper, served on toast with maitre d'hôtel butter and garnished with watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and watercress work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Broiled Plovers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the birds

  1. Pick, singe, draw, and wipe the plovers well.

  2. Remove the eyes and split them through the back without separating the parts.

  3. Season with a pinch of coarse sea salt and half as much black pepper.

  4. Add 2 tablespoons of oil and rub in the seasoning thoroughly.

Broil and serve

  1. Place the birds on a broiler and cook for 4 minutes on each side.

  2. Dress them on a hot dish with 6 pieces of toast spread with ½ cup of maitre d'hôtel butter.

  3. Garnish with a little watercress and serve.

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 + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + watercresstop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Plovers
Provide the main meat, which is rich because the birds are fat.
Oil
Coats the birds so the seasoning adheres and the skin browns without drying.
Maitre d'hôtel butter
Adds fat and richness that moistens the toast and complements the broiled birds.

The step that matters

Broiling each side. The birds are split and oiled, so they cook quickly under direct heat. Too little time leaves them raw near the bone, while too much dries the lean parts and burns the oil-coated surface.

“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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