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Anotbbr Wat to Stew Pigeons

A method of stewing whole trussed pigeons in a butter and flour gravy with livers, gizzards, parsley and hard-boiled egg yolks.

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 ↓

Anotbbr Wat to Stew Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the pigeons and truss them as for boiling.

  2. Season the inside with pepper and salt.

Stew

  1. In a saucepan, brown the butter with the flour.

  2. Add enough gravy or water to nearly cover the pigeons.

  3. Add the pigeons, livers, gizzards, pinions, salt, and parsley.

  4. Let them stew for 45 minutes.

  5. A few minutes before serving, add the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and adds rich flavour as it browns.
Flour
Browned with the butter, it thickens the gravy into a smooth sauce.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Crumbled into the liquid, they add body and a rich, creamy texture to the sauce.
Pigeons
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing in liquid.

The step that matters

Add the egg yolks only a few minutes before serving. Egg yolks thicken and can curdle or turn grainy if held at a long simmer, so they should be added near the end and kept warm rather than boiled.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Sagefits about as well
  4. Capersfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, flour, liver, egg. 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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