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Stewed Pigeons

A stew of pigeons filled with chicken stuffing, cooked with butter, flour, water, pepper, sea salt, and optional parsley or onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Stewed Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt butter and add white flour in a stewpan, browning them well.

  2. Add the pigeons filled with chicken stuffing and nearly cover with water.

  3. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and chopped parsley or onion if desired.

  4. Add the giblets to the stew.

  5. Stew for 1.5 to 2 hours.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

White flour
Browns in the butter and thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy.
Butter
Carries the browning of the flour and adds richness to the gravy.
Pigeons
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow stewing.
Giblets
Add extra meaty flavour to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Browning the butter and flour well. Cooking the flour in melted butter until deeply browned builds the nutty, roasted flavour and colour of the gravy. Under-browned roux leaves the sauce pale and tasting of raw flour.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, chicken, pepper, onion):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Turmericfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, chicken, pepper, onion. 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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