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Potted Pigeons

Potted Pigeons is a stew of pigeons simmered in brown gravy with butter, flour, and Worcestershire sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Potted Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Stuff the pigeons.

  2. Season the pigeons with coarse sea salt and pepper.

  3. Roll the pigeons in flour.

  4. Brown the pigeons in salt pork fat.

Cook and thicken the sauce

  1. Place the pigeons in a stew-pan and cover with brown gravy; cook until tender.

  2. Brown 2 tablespoons of butter in a separate pan.

  3. Add 2 tablespoons of flour to the butter and cook until brown.

  4. Pour in 1 pint of hot water and cover the pigeons.

  5. Add ½ teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Pepper + porktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter 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, moist cooking in the gravy.
Flour
Coats the pigeons so they brown well, and cooked in butter it thickens the sauce.
Salt pork fat
Conducts heat to brown the coated pigeons and adds savoury richness.
Butter
Carries the flour for a roux, adding richness and a nutty flavour to the sauce.
Brown gravy
Supplies the liquid that keeps the pigeons moist and flavours them as they cook.

The step that matters

Cooking the butter and flour until brown. The roux must cook long enough to lose its raw flour taste and gain colour, but if it burns it turns bitter and its thickening power weakens.

“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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