Skip to main content
Main

To Stew Pigeons

A stew of pigeons with butter, water, lemon peel, mace, parsley, and a creamy sauce thickened with egg yolk and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Stew Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the pigeons

  1. Combine the pigeons, giblets, butter, water, lemon peel, mace, parsley, salt, and pepper in a stew-pan.

  2. Cover the pan tightly and stew until the pigeons are tender.

Finish the sauce

  1. Mix the egg yolk with the cream and a bit of butter dusted with flour in a bowl.

  2. Thicken the sauce with the egg mixture and let it stew for an additional 10 minutes before serving.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, softening the texture of the finished sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the stew and helps enrich the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when mixed with butter, helping it hold together.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce with the egg mixture. Egg yolk thickens when heated, but if the sauce gets too hot it can curdle or turn grainy. Add the egg mixture gently and keep the sauce at a gentle stew.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon, parsley, pepper, egg, cream, flour. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes