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Stewed Pigeons

A stew of pigeons cooked with butter, flour, salt, pepper, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the pigeons down the back and clean them.

  2. Cut them into four pieces and wash and dry them.

Stew

  1. In a stew pan, melt the butter and mix it with the flour, salt, and pepper.

  2. Add enough water to just cover the pigeons.

  3. Stew the pigeons until they are tender.

  4. If the gravy is not thick enough, add a little more flour.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

Butter
Enriches the gravy with fat and adds rich flavour as it melts into the liquid.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy as it is heated with the fat and water.

The step that matters

Stew the pigeons until they are tender. Pigeon meat is firm and lean, so it needs long, gentle simmering to break down connective tissue. Cooking too hard or too briefly leaves it tough. Keeping the liquid at a low simmer lets the meat soften evenly.

“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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