Skip to main content
Main

Squirrel Stew

A stew of squirrel, bacon, corn, butter, and pastry bits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Corn and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,324 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Squirrel Stew

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the squirrels and bacon until about half done.

  2. Add the corn, butter, salt, and peppers.

  3. Include small bits of pastry as you would in chicken pie.

  4. Cover and cook until well done.

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. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Squirrels
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long simmering.
Fat bacon
Adds rendered fat and savory flavor to the broth.
Corn
Adds sweetness and body as it cooks into the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the broth.
Pastry
Thickens the broth and adds dumpling-like pieces, as in chicken pie.

The step that matters

Cover and cook until well done. Squirrel meat is lean and tough, so it needs a long, gentle, covered simmer to become tender. Stopping early leaves the meat chewy.

“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

Corn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesCream of Corn SoupCream of Corn Soup50 recipesGreen Corn SoupGreen Corn Soup46 recipesCornmeal GruelCornmeal Gruel41 recipes