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Squab, or Young Wild Pigeon Pie

A savory pie made from young wild pigeons simmered with water, lemon, butter, and thickened with flour, topped with biscuit or puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Squab, or Young Wild Pigeon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the squabs

  1. Skin, draw, and wash the squabs.

  2. Place them in a stew pan with just enough water to cover.

Cook and season

  1. Add salt and lemon juice, then cook gently until tender, replenishing water as needed.

  2. Once cooked, add butter and pepper.

  3. Mix flour with a little water to make a smooth paste, then stir it in to thicken.

  4. Let it boil briefly, then taste and adjust seasoning.

Assemble the pie

  1. Transfer the mixture to a baking dish and cover with a biscuit or puff pastry crust.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Flour + biscuittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together841 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together697 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

Squabs
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow, gentle simmering.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, spoonable sauce when heated.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the meat and sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening with flour paste. Flour must be mixed smooth with water before stirring in, otherwise it clumps. Boiling briefly after adding it lets the starch swell fully and thicken the sauce, which is why the step ends with a short boil.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (squab, butter, pepper, flour, biscuit):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against squab, butter, pepper, flour, biscuit. 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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