Name: Boiled Pigeons
Ingredients: pigeons; coarse sea salt; parsley; butter

Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Boiled Pigeons

Ingredients

pigeons
coarse sea salt
parsley
butter

Directions

Prepare

Truss the pigeons like boiled chickens.

Boil

Drop them into plenty of hot water and add a little coarse sea salt.
After fifteen minutes, lift them out and place on a dish.

Serve

Pour melted butter and chopped parsley over the pigeons 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.

Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

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 gentle simmering in water.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture to the cooked birds when poured over them as a sauce.

“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.