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Snipe Pudding

A savory pudding made with snipe, onions, butter, flour, port wine, stock, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Snipe Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the trail from the snipes and season them with cayenne pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, fry the chopped onions in butter until browned.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for 2 minutes.

  3. Add the herb mixture and moisten with port wine. Boil for 5 minutes.

Assemble and cook

  1. Combine the snipes with the mixture in a prepared pudding basin, add a little stock, and finish.

  2. Boil for about 2 hours.

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

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

  2. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Snipes
Form the main meat of the pudding, supplying the savoury filling.
Onions
Soften and brown in butter, adding sweetness and savoury depth to the base.
Butter
Fat that fries the onions and carries flavour through the mixture.
Flour
Cooked briefly with the butter to thicken the mixture as it moistens.
Port wine
Moistens the mixture and adds sweetness and richness.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, lemon, butter, flour, port wine):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, lemon, butter, flour, port wine. 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.

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