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Potted Pigeons

Potted pigeons are pigeons simmered with vegetables and stock, served on buttered toast with a gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Potted Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and braise

  1. Clean and truss the pigeons.

  2. Dredge the pigeons with flour, coarse sea salt, and black pepper.

  3. Place the pigeons in a stew pan on slices of bacon, with the breasts facing up.

  4. Add the diced carrot and onion, then cover with stock or hot water.

  5. Let them simmer until tender.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter.

  2. Stir in 1 tablespoon of flour.

  3. Gradually add the liquid and vegetables left in the pan.

  4. Season the gravy to taste with salt and pepper.

  5. Serve each pigeon on a thin slice of buttered toast.

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. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + carrottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 becomes tender through slow simmering.
Bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor to the meat and the cooking liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the toast and the gravy.
Flour
Coats the pigeons and thickens the gravy as it cooks in the butter.

The step that matters

Simmering until tender. Pigeon meat is lean and firm, so it needs gentle, low-heat simmering to break down connective tissue. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and make it dry.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, pepper, carrot, butter):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, carrot, butter. 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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