Skip to main content
Main

Pigeons Fricasseed

Pigeons cooked in mutton gravy with morels, browning, lemon, and garnished with forcemeat balls and pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mutton and lemon work together. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 888 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Pigeons Fricasseed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and fry

  1. Cut the pigeons as you would chickens for fricassee.

  2. Fry them until light brown.

Stew and finish

  1. Put them into good mutton gravy and stew for about 30 minutes.

  2. Add morels, browning, and lemon slice.

  3. Remove the pigeons and thicken the gravy.

  4. Strain the gravy over the pigeons and garnish with forcemeat balls and pickles.

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. Mutton + lemontop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together888 recipes

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

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 as it stews in the gravy.
Mutton gravy
Forms the cooking liquid and body of the sauce, carrying flavor to the pigeons.
Morels
Add earthy, savory aroma and depth to the gravy.
Browning
Adds color and a deeper, roasted flavor to the gravy.

The step that matters

Frying the pigeons until light brown. Browning the surface through the Maillard reaction builds savory flavor and color that carry into the gravy. Pale frying yields a flatter sauce, while overly dark frying can turn bitter.

“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.

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipesMutton SoupMutton Soup56 recipes