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Stewed Pigeons

A stew of pigeons cooked with pork, butter, onions, parsley, claret, and spices, served over hot buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Stewed Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the pigeons in a pot with the slice of pork and butter, without adding water.

Stew

  1. Cover the pot and cook over a gentle fire for 2 hours, stirring occasionally.

  2. Add the chopped onions and parsley during cooking.

  3. After 2 hours, add the claret, red pepper, salt, and cloves, and stew for an additional 30 minutes.

  4. Take some gravy from the pot, thicken it with 1 teaspoon of flour, and return it to the pot, stirring well.

Serve

  1. Serve the pigeons on slices of hot buttered toast and pour the gravy over them.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  5. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

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 stew.
Pork
Adds savoury fat and meaty flavour to the stewing liquid and gravy.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and helps start the stew.
Claret
Adds acidity and wine flavour that deepens the gravy during the final stew.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the pigeons and toast.

The step that matters

Thickening the gravy with flour. Flour must be stirred into a portion of hot gravy so it disperses evenly; added directly as dry powder it clumps and leaves lumps in the sauce.

Swap the onion

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

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

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