Skip to main content
Main

Pigeons in Compote

Pigeons stewed with butter, flour, broth, herbs, ham, mushrooms, and onions, finished with a lemon juice glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Pigeons in Compote

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Parboil the pigeons for 30 minutes.

  2. Remove them from the water and squeeze the juice of half a lemon over each breast.

Stew

  1. In a stew-pan, melt the butter, add the flour, and stir in the broth.

  2. Add the herbs, pepper, salt, ham, and mushrooms to the stew-pan.

  3. Place the pigeons in the mixture and let them stew slowly for 2 hours.

  4. Blanch the button onions and add them to the stew-pan half an hour before the pigeons are done.

Serve

  1. Remove the herbs and ham, skim the gravy, and pour it over the pigeons in a dish, laying the onions around.

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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Lemon + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Pigeons
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow, gentle stewing.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth gravy.
Weak broth
Forms the liquid base of the stew and sets the gravy's savoury character.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and moisture to the stew.
Button onions
Add sweetness and a tender texture as they cook in the gravy.

The step that matters

Stewing the pigeons slowly. Gentle, slow heat over a long period breaks down connective tissue so the meat becomes tender. Boiling hard instead toughens the meat and clouds the gravy.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, butter, flour, ham, mushroom, onion):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, butter, flour, ham, mushroom, onion. 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.

More pigeon stew recipes

with Cabbage 3with Green Peas 3with Peas 3 See all 101 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes