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To Stew Pigeons

A stew of pigeons cooked with stock, flour, butter, bread crumbs, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick and wash the pigeons well, then truss them like fowl for boiling.

  2. Mix 2 oz of butter with the bread crumbs, pepper, and salt, and stuff half into the breast of each pigeon.

Brown and stew

  1. Dust the pigeons with flour and brown them in a covered stew pan with a good piece of butter.

  2. Add a little flour for thickening and pour in the stock or hot water.

  3. Season well and let them stew slowly for 20 to 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve each pigeon on a piece of toasted bread.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  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).

Flour and butter 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
Form the main body of the stew and become tender through slow stewing.
Butter
Adds richness and helps brown the pigeons before stewing.
Flour
Thickens the stew liquid as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the butter and seasoning to form a moist stuffing for the pigeons.

The step that matters

Brown the pigeons before stewing. Browning the floured pigeons in butter builds deeper flavour through browning reactions and helps the flour form a good base for thickening the stew.

“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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