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Stewed Pigeon

A stew of pigeon cooked with butter, flour, stock, vegetables, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Stewed Pigeon

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy base

  1. Heat the butter in an iron saucepan until hot.

  2. Dredge the cleaned pigeon with flour and brown it well on all sides.

  3. Remove the pigeon and stir the flour into the butter.

  4. Gradually add the stock or water, stirring until boiling.

Stew and serve

  1. Add the flavoring vegetables, browning, ketchup, Harvey's Sauce, salt, and pepper.

  2. Place the pigeon on top of the vegetables and simmer slowly for one hour.

  3. Serve the pigeon on a slice of hot toast and strain the gravy over it.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Pigeon
Main protein that becomes tender during slow simmering while its surface browns first.
Flour
Browns with the pigeon and thickens the stock into a gravy when stirred into the butter.
Butter
Fat that carries the browning and helps build flavor in the gravy base.
Stock or water
Liquid that forms the body of the gravy and gently cooks the pigeon.
Flavoring vegetables
Release sweetness and aroma into the simmering liquid, flavoring the gravy.

The step that matters

Brown the pigeon well on all sides. Browning through Maillard reactions builds the deep savory flavor of the gravy, and pale pigeon yields a flat-tasting sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, turnip, carrot, celery, ketchup, sauce):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, turnip, carrot, celery, ketchup, sauce. 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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