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Woodcock, Roast

Roasted woodcock served on buttered toast with watercress and melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 340 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Woodcock, Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the birds

  1. Pluck the woodcocks, leaving necks and heads intact, and truss them securely.

  2. Cover the woodcocks with bacon slices and fasten them to a spit, feet downwards.

Roast

  1. Sprinkle the birds with flour and place them before a clear fire, basting continually with fresh butter.

  2. Prepare buttered toast without crust and place it under the birds after five minutes to catch drippings.

  3. Baste while holding a dish underneath until steam draws to the fire.

Serve

  1. Serve each woodcock on a piece of toast, garnished with watercress, and accompany with melted butter.

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. Flour + watercresstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together340 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Watercress + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Woodcocks
Are the main subject of the dish, cooked whole and served intact on toast.
Bacon
Covers the birds, basting them with its fat and protecting the lean meat as it roasts.
Flour
Dusted over the birds, it helps form a light crust that promotes browning.
Butter
Basted over the birds for moisture and richness, and served melted as an accompaniment.
Buttered toast
Catches the drippings beneath the birds and serves as the base they are plated on.

The step that matters

Baste while holding a dish underneath until steam draws to the fire. Frequent basting with fat keeps the lean birds moist and promotes even browning, while the drippings collected below carry flavour to the toast.

“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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