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Roast Pigeons

Roast pigeons stuffed with bread crumbs, parsley, butter, pepper, and salt, then roasted and basted with butter, finished with a butter and water gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper 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 ↓

Roast Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Pluck and draw the pigeons.

  2. Mix bread crumbs, parsley, butter, pepper, and salt. Stuff a little of the mixture into each bird.

Roast

  1. Lard the pigeons and roast them in a hot oven (400°F / 200°C) for 20 minutes.

  2. Baste with butter during roasting.

Make the gravy

  1. After removing the birds, add a little butter and boiling water to the roasting pan to make 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.

  1. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  4. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 that is roasted whole and served.
Bread crumbs
Absorb butter and juices in the stuffing, keeping the filling moist and light.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the skin brown while basting.

The step that matters

Roasting at high heat with basting. Roasting in a hot oven browns the skin and renders fat, while regular basting with butter keeps the lean birds from drying out. Removing the birds at the right time keeps the meat tender.

Swap the parsley

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, pepper. 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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