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Braised Pigeons with Mushrooms

Braised pigeons stuffed with breadcrumbs and pork, cooked with vegetables and mushrooms in stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Braised Pigeons with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Drain, wash, and stuff the pigeons with a mixture of breadcrumbs and chopped fat pork, seasoned with onion juice, salt, and pepper.

  2. Prepare a bed of minced carrot, onion, celery, and parsley in a pot.

Braise

  1. Lay the stuffed pigeons on the bed of vegetables, add stock or butter and water, cover, and cook gently for one hour or until tender.

  2. Remove the pigeons and keep them hot.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Rub the gravy through a colander into a saucepan, season to taste, and add the chopped mushrooms.

  2. Simmer for five minutes, thicken with brown roux, boil, and pour over the pigeons.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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, covered braising.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb juices from the pork and bird, keeping the stuffing moist and lightly bound.
Chopped fat pork
Adds fat that bastes the stuffing and the meat, contributing moisture and richness.
Brown roux
Thickens the gravy so it coats the pigeons rather than running thin.
Fresh mushrooms
Add earthy savoury flavour and a tender texture to the gravy.

The step that matters

Simmer the gravy before thickening. Boiling after adding the roux is needed so the starch swells and thickens fully; if the gravy is not hot enough, it stays thin and floury-tasting.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper, carrot, celery, parsley, butter, mushroom):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, carrot, celery, parsley, butter, mushroom. 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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