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Salmi of Woodcock H LA Royale

Salmi of Woodcock à la Royale is a roasted woodcock served with a brown sauce reduced with champagne, shallots, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,523 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Salmi of Woodcock H LA Royale

Ingredients

Directions

Roast the woodcocks

  1. Prepare the woodcocks for roasting and roast them until cooked.

  2. Let the woodcocks cool, then dismember and remove the skin.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, combine the woodcocks with stock and simmer without boiling.

  2. In another saucepan, combine shallots, lemon peel, carcasses, brown sauce, and champagne. Boil the mixture until reduced.

  3. Strain the sauce over the woodcocks and add a squeeze of lemon juice.

  4. Garnish with fried bread sippets.

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. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Shallot + champagnetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together68 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Shallot + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Lemon + champagnetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Shallot + saucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Woodcocks
Provide the main cooked meat that the dish is built around.
Shallots
Add a mild aromatic onion flavour to the reduced sauce.
Brown sauce
Adds depth, colour and savoury body to the sauce.
Champagne
Adds acidity and fruity aroma as it reduces into the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until reduced. Boiling concentrates the flavour of the carcasses, shallots and wine while evaporating liquid, so the sauce becomes rich rather than thin or watery. Reducing too little leaves it weak; reducing too far can make it salty or syrupy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, sauce, champagne, bread):

  1. Avocadofits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, sauce, champagne, bread. 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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