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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 garnish.

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 and cook

  1. Fry the corned pork in a pot until it begins to brown and releases fat.

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

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

Brown and make the gravy

  1. Remove some liquid, then turn the pigeons to brown them nicely.

  2. Heat the reserved liquid.

  3. Add the heated liquid back to the pot along with extra thyme and pepper, turning the pigeons until browned.

  4. Thicken the gravy with a little flour.

Serve

  1. 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; the long covered simmer makes them tender.
Corned pork
Releases fat and salty, savoury flavour into the cooking liquid as it browns.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy.

The step that matters

Covered boil until tender. Boiling the pigeons tightly covered in partly submerged liquid for about an hour breaks down connective tissue, so they become tender rather than tough. Too little liquid or lifting the lid too often can leave the meat dry or undercooked.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, thyme, 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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