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 Snipes
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Pick, singe, draw, and dry the snipes well.
Remove the skin from the heads and split them in half without detaching the parts.
Season with salt, pepper, and oil, then place them on a dish.
Broil and serve
Broil the snipes with the bills stuck into the breasts for 4 minutes on each side.
Place the toast on a hot dish and arrange the snipes on top.
Spread the maitre-d’hotel butter over the snipes and garnish with watercress before serving.
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.
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Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together983 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
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Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together85,593 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
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Butter + watercresstop 24% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Snipes
- Provide the main meat, which browns and firms under the broiler's direct heat.
- Maitre-d’hotel butter
- Adds richness and moisture, melting over the hot birds and into the toast.
- Toast
- Serves as a crisp base that soaks up juices and butter from the snipes.
- Oil
- Coats the birds so they brown evenly and do not dry out under the broiler.
The step that matters
Broil the snipes for 4 minutes on each side. Broiling is intense direct heat, so timing matters. Too little leaves the meat underdone, while too much dries it out and toughens the proteins, leaving the birds less juicy.
“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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