Name: Broiled Pigeons or Squabs
Ingredients: young pigeons or squabs; pepper; coarse sea salt; butter

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 ↓

Broiled Pigeons or Squabs

Ingredients

young pigeons or squabs
pepper
coarse sea salt
butter

Directions

Prepare

Clean, wash, and dry the pigeons or squabs with a clean cloth.
Split them down the back.

Broil and serve

Broil them like chickens.
Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Serve with liberal amounts of butter.

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).
Pepper + buttertop 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

Young pigeons or squabs: Provide the meat, which is the main component of the dish.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture to the cooked birds when served.

“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.