Skip to main content
Main

Snipe Pudding

A savory pudding made with snipe, onion, mushrooms, wine, and suet paste, steamed for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Snipe Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the snipe

  1. Halve the snipe, remove the gizzards, and reserve the trail.

  2. Season the snipe with cayenne and lemon juice, and set aside.

Make the sauce

  1. Fry the sliced onion until light brown.

  2. Add mushrooms, parsley, garlic, nutmeg, and herbs to the onion.

  3. Moisten the mixture with wine.

  4. Boil the mixture for 10 minutes.

  5. Add the trail to the mixture.

  6. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

Assemble and steam

  1. Line a basin with thinly rolled suet paste.

  2. Place the snipe inside the basin.

  3. Add the sauce and truffles to the snipe.

  4. Cover the snipe with suet paste.

  5. Steam for 2 hours.

  6. Serve hot.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Snipe
Provides the main meat, which is cooked gently by steaming inside the suet crust.
Suet paste
Forms a rich pastry casing that encloses the birds and keeps them moist while steaming.
Onion
Browned first to build a sweet, savoury base for the sauce.
Wine
Moistens the mixture and adds acidity and depth to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the snipe rather than running out.
Truffles
Adds a strong, earthy aroma to the filling.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a sieve. Pressing the cooked sauce through a sieve breaks down the solids into a smooth, even texture. Skipping this leaves lumps and uneven thickness in the finished filling.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, lemon, flour, mushroom, parsley, garlic, nutmeg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, lemon, flour, mushroom, parsley, garlic, nutmeg. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes