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Pigeon Soup

A soup made from pigeons, water, parsley, spinach, cream, bread crumbs, sea salt, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,025 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Pigeon Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Cut up 2 pigeons and place them in a pot with 4 quarts of cold water, along with the necks, livers, and pinions of the remaining pigeons.

  2. Simmer and boil until the substance is extracted, then strain the soup.

Finish the soup

  1. Return the soup to the kettle and add the chopped parsley, spinach, cream, and boiled bread crumbs.

  2. Truss and season the remaining pigeons with coarse sea salt and a little mace.

  3. Boil the seasoned pigeons in the soup until they are tender.

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 + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + macetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Spinach + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

  5. Spinach + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Pigeons
Provide the meat and the flavour base of the broth, and become tender in the finished soup.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, mellow body to the finished soup.
Bread crumbs
Thicken the soup slightly and give it body.
Spinach
Adds leafy flavour and a soft, green texture to the soup.

The step that matters

Boil the seasoned pigeons until tender. Boiling gently keeps the meat moist while it softens; a hard rolling boil can toughen the proteins and make the birds stringy. Add the cream and bread crumbs before the final cook to avoid curdling or uneven thickening.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, spinach, cream, bread):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, spinach, cream, bread. 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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