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To Stew Birds

A stew of game birds cooked with bacon, butter, and seasonings, served with the resulting gravy.

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 and stuff them with bread crumbs seasoned with pepper, coarse sea salt, butter, or chopped salt pork. Fasten them tightly.

  2. Line a stew pan with slices of bacon.

Stew

  1. Add 1 quart of water and a piece of butter the size of a goose egg or 4 slices of salt pork.

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

  3. Stew until tender, then remove the birds and strain the gravy over them.

  4. If the liquid is too reduced, add boiling water.

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

Birds
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender through slow stewing.
Bread crumbs
Absorb seasoned fats and juices inside the birds, keeping the stuffing moist.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour into the stuffing and gravy.
Salt pork
Renders fat and salty flavour into the water, enriching the gravy.
Bacon
Lines the pan, releasing smoky fat and salt into the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Stew until tender, then strain the gravy. Slow simmering at a gentle heat breaks down connective tissue in the birds. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can break it apart, so keep the liquid at a low 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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