Name: Squabs Stewed
Ingredients: 2 squabs; 2 tablespoons butter; 1 teaspoon salt; pepper; cayenne

Why it works: Squab and butter work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 48 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Squabs Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the squabs as for broiling.
Melt the butter in a chafing dish over medium heat.
Add the squabs and cook for 10 minutes.
Turn the squabs and cook for an additional 5 minutes.
Season with salt, pepper, and cayenne.

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.

Squab + buttertop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together48 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Squab + peppertop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together35 recipes

Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

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

What each ingredient does

Squabs: Provide the main meat, which cooks through and browns in the butter.
Butter: Conducts heat and adds fat, helping the squabs brown and carrying flavour.

“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.