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Pigeon Soup

A soup made by boiling pigeons with herbs, spices, and bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Chive and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 163 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Pigeon Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Cut down two of the oldest pigeons.

  2. Place them with the necks, pinions, livers, and gizzards of the others into four quarts of water.

  3. Boil until the substance is extracted.

  4. Strain the mixture.

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Season the pigeons with mixed spices and coarse sea salt.

  2. Truss them for stewing.

Fry the bread and finish

  1. Melt one quarter pound of butter in a frying pan until it boils.

  2. Mix in a handful of bread crumbs, then stir the bread crumbs with a knife until they are a fine brown.

  3. Boil the whole pigeons in the soup with the herbs and fried bread until tender.

  4. If the soup is not seasoned enough, add more mixed spices and salt.

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. Chive + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Parsley + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. 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 meat and body for the soup, becoming tender through long simmering.
Butter
Fats the frying pan and browns the bread crumbs, adding richness and nutty flavour.
Bread crumbs
Toasted in butter to add browned flavour and body to the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the bread crumbs in the butter. Butter that boils too hot can burn, and crumbs left unattended can go from fine brown to scorched. Stirring keeps the browning even and the flavour pleasant.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, chive, butter, 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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