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Boiled Pigeons and Bacon

A dish of boiled pigeons served with bacon, spinach, butter, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,025 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Boiled Pigeons and Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook the pigeons

  1. Clean the pigeons and tuck their legs under their wings.

  2. Boil the pigeons in a mixture of milk and water for 20 minutes.

Prepare the bacon

  1. Remove the skin from the bacon and brown it.

Plate and serve

  1. Place the bacon in the center of a serving dish and arrange the pigeons around it.

  2. Add lumps of steamed spinach and drizzle melted butter over everything.

  3. Serve with parsley and butter on the side.

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. Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  4. Milk + spinachtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together914 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Spinach + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,583 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Pigeons
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender and moist when gently simmered.
Bacon
Adds salty, savoury fat flavour and browns for colour and aroma.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture when drizzled over the finished dish.
Milk
Gives the poaching liquid a mild, creamy flavour and softens the meat.

The step that matters

Boil the pigeons for 20 minutes. Boiling too hard can toughen and dry the meat, so keep the liquid at a gentle simmer. Overcooking also makes the delicate pigeon meat stringy and dry.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, parsley):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, parsley. 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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