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To Stew Birds

A stew of birds cooked with bread crumbs, salt pork, bacon, and optional aromatics.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Stew Birds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the birds.

  2. Stuff the birds with bread crumbs seasoned with pepper, coarse sea salt, butter, or chopped salt pork, then fasten them tightly.

  3. Line a stew pan with slices of bacon.

Stew

  1. Add 1 quart of water and 1 tablespoon of butter, or four slices of salt pork.

  2. If desired, add sliced onions, sweet herbs, and mace.

  3. Stew the birds until tender.

  4. Add boiling water if the liquid is too reduced.

Serve

  1. Remove them and strain 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Bread + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Butter + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Soak up seasoning and butter inside the birds, keeping the stuffing moist and tender as they stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and helping the gravy taste rounded.
Bacon
Lines the pan, releasing smoky fat and flavor into the liquid and the birds.
Salt pork
Adds savory fat and salty flavor to the stuffing and the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Stew the birds until tender. Slow simmering breaks down connective tissue in tough birds, so they become tender. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and dry it out, so keep the liquid at a gentle simmer.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, butter, pork, mace):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Onionthe original
  4. Tomatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, butter, pork, mace. 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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