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Pigeons with Pickled Mushrooms

A stew of pigeons simmered in butter and flour with pickled mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Pigeons with Pickled Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt butter in a stew pan and coat it with flour.

  2. Add the pigeons and pickled mushrooms.

  3. Stew for about 5 minutes.

  4. Transfer the pigeons to a dish and pour the sauce 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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + mushroomtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Main meat; dark, rich flesh that becomes tender with short, gentle stewing.
Butter
Carries flavour and adds richness to the sauce base.
Flour
Coats the pigeons and thickens the sauce as it cooks.
Pickled mushrooms
Adds acidity and savoury depth that cuts the richness of the meat.

The step that matters

Stew for about 5 minutes. Pigeon is small and lean-textured, so a short, gentle stew keeps the meat tender. Longer or hotter cooking tightens the proteins and makes the flesh tough and dry.

“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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