Name: Broiled Squabs
Ingredients: 2 squabs; 2 tablespoons butter; coarse sea salt; black pepper; buttered toast; hot stock or gravy

Why it works: Squab and butter work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 48 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Broiled Squabs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Preheat your grill or broiler.
Split the squabs down the back.

Cook and serve

Rub the squabs all over with butter, then season with salt and pepper.
Broil the squabs over red coals until cooked through.
Serve the squabs on buttered toast, drizzled with a little hot stock or gravy.

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.

Squab + buttertop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together48 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Squab + peppertop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together35 recipes

Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

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 cooks through under direct high heat.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture to the surface and helps it brown under the heat.

“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.