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To Cook Pigeons or Partridges

A stew of pigeons or partridges cooked with onions, gravy, hot water, pepper, coarse sea salt, and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Cook Pigeons or Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Brown the pigeons or partridges.

  2. Remove them and fry onions cut into quarters in the gravy for a short time.

  3. Place the onions in a stew-pan with the gravy and enough hot water to cover them.

  4. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt, then cook for one hour.

  5. Add 2 tablespoons of flour to the gravy half an hour before serving.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  2. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Pigeons or partridges
Provide the main meat, which browning develops flavour in before the long simmer.
Onions
Soften during cooking and add sweetness to the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it is added near the end of cooking.

The step that matters

Add 2 tablespoons of flour to the gravy half an hour before serving.. Flour needs to be stirred into hot liquid and simmered for a while to thicken smoothly and lose its raw taste. Adding it too late leaves the gravy lumpy or floury.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour. 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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