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Stewed Pigeons

A stew of pigeons cooked with corned pork, onion dressing, thyme, pepper, and flour, served with gravy and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Stewed Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a pot, cook the corned pork until it begins to brown and releases its fat.

  2. Arrange the pigeons around the pork in the pot, leaving the pork inside.

Stew and brown

  1. Add enough hot water to partially cover the pigeons, cover tightly, and boil for about 1 hour until tender.

  2. Remove some of the liquid and turn the pigeons to brown them nicely.

  3. Heat the reserved liquid and add it back to the pot along with extra thyme and pepper, turning the pigeons until browned.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken the gravy with a little flour and serve the pigeons with the gravy poured over them, garnished with parsley.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pigeons
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender during the long covered simmer.
Corned pork
Renders fat and seasons the cooking liquid as it browns in the pot.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy.

The step that matters

Covered boil until tender. Boiling the pigeons partly submerged in hot water for about an hour, tightly covered, breaks down connective tissue in the tougher meat. Lifting the lid too early or letting the liquid boil away can leave the birds dry and chewy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (thyme, pork, pepper, flour, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against thyme, pork, pepper, flour, parsley. 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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