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Broiled Pigeons

Broiled pigeons seasoned with pepper, coarse sea salt, and served with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Squab and butter work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 48 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Broiled Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean, wash, and dry the pigeons with a clean cloth.

  2. Split them down the back.

Cook and serve

  1. Broil them like spring chickens.

  2. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Add plenty of butter when 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. Squab + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together48 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Squab + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Young pigeons
The main ingredient: the meat that is broiled and eaten.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries flavour and moisture over the cooked meat.

The step that matters

Broiling the split pigeons. Direct high heat browns the skin quickly, but the thicker parts need time to cook through. Splitting the birds lets them lie flat for more even cooking. Watch closely so the skin browns without the meat drying out.

“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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