Name: Stewed Pigeons
Ingredients: 2 pigeons; ½ head of hard white cabbage; salt to taste; pepper to taste

Why it works: Cabbage and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,081 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Stewed Pigeons

Ingredients

2 pigeons
½ head of hard white cabbage
salt to taste
pepper to taste

Directions

Prepare

Wash, draw, and clean the pigeons, then soak them for 30 minutes.
Cut the cabbage into quarters and boil until tender.
Drain the boiled cabbage and slice it.

Stew

Place the sliced cabbage at the bottom of a stewpan.
Season the pigeons with salt and pepper and lay them on top of the cabbage.
Cover the pigeons with additional cabbage if desired.

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.

Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pigeons: Provide the main meat, which becomes tender and flavourful as it stews.
Hard white cabbage: Forms a bed under the pigeons and adds moisture and mild sweetness as it cooks.

“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.