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Stewed Pigeons

A stew of pigeons cooked with butter, flour, peas, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Pluck and clean the pigeons, removing heads and feet.

  2. In a saucepan, heat butter until smoking hot.

  3. Brown the pigeons in the hot butter.

Make the stew

  1. Dust the browned pigeons with flour and stir until the flour is brown.

  2. Cover the pigeons with boiling water and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Simmer gently until the pigeons are tender.

  4. Shell enough young peas to fill a pint measure.

  5. Add the peas to the pigeons and cook until the peas are just tender.

Serve

  1. Serve the pigeons on a deep platter with the peas underneath.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + peastop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,331 recipes

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

  3. Butter + peastop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

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

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 through long gentle simmering.
Butter
Carries heat for browning the pigeons and adds rich flavour.
Flour
Browns in the fat and thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce.
Young peas
Add sweetness and a fresh, tender texture to the stew.

The step that matters

Brown the flour. Stirring the flour until it turns brown in the fat develops a nutty, deeper flavour and colour. Stopping early leaves a raw, pasty taste, and burning it makes the sauce bitter.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Black-eyed peafits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

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