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Stewed Snipe

A stew of snipe cooked in butter and flour, served over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Snipe

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the snipe

  1. Pluck the snipe, remove heads, feet, and gizzards, and wipe them with a clean towel.

Brown and stew

  1. In a saucepan, heat the butter until smoking hot, then add the snipe and brown them quickly.

  2. Dust the browned snipe with flour and stir until the flour is brown.

  3. Cover the snipe with boiling water, season with salt and pepper, and let them cook gently for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Meanwhile, toast the bread slices.

  2. Serve each snipe on a slice of toast, pouring some of the cooking sauce over them, and serve the remaining sauce in a separate dish.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Snipe
The main protein, which is browned and then gently stewed until tender.
Butter
Fat for browning the snipe, adding richness and a toasty flavour to the surface.
Dry flour
Dusted on the browned birds and cooked until brown, it thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce and adds colour.

The step that matters

Browning the snipe quickly in very hot butter. Searing at high heat browns the surface through the Maillard reaction, building flavour. If the pan is not hot enough, the birds steam and turn grey, and the sauce tastes flat.

“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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