Skip to main content
Main

To Roast Pigeons

Roasted pigeons prepared by soaking, boiling, coating with flour, basting with butter, and roasting for about two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

To Roast Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove pinned feathers or skin from the pigeons.

  2. Clean the inside thoroughly.

  3. Soak the pigeons in water for 30 minutes to remove blood.

Boil and roast

  1. Boil the pigeons in salted water for 30 minutes, skimming off any scum.

  2. Remove the pigeons, coat them in flour, and place them in a roasting pan.

  3. Strain the boiling water and add some to the pan with a small piece of butter.

  4. Baste the pigeons with the liquid and season with pepper.

  5. Roast the pigeons for nearly 2 hours.

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. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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 is boiled first and then roasted until tender.
Flour
Coats the birds, helping the surface brown during roasting.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the pan liquid used for basting, aiding browning.

The step that matters

Roast the pigeons for nearly 2 hours. Long, steady roasting after boiling breaks down connective tissue and finishes the meat. Basting with the pan liquid keeps the surface moist while it browns.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes