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Roast Pigeons

Roast pigeons seasoned with salt and pepper, wrapped in bacon and butter, and cooked over a brisk fire.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Roast Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Tie the pigeons in shape, drawing the skin over the back.

  2. Place thin slices of bacon over the breasts and add a small piece of butter inside each pigeon.

Roast and serve

  1. Skewer the pigeons and roast them over a brisk fire until thoroughly cooked, basting with butter.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper 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.

  1. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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 cooks through over high heat and becomes tender when young.
Thin slices of bacon
Lay over the breasts to baste the lean meat with melting fat and add savory flavor.
Butter
Adds moisture and richness as it melts inside the birds and during basting.

The step that matters

Roasting over a brisk fire until thoroughly cooked. Lean birds dry out quickly, so the heat must be strong enough to cook them through while basting with butter keeps the meat moist. Pulling them too early leaves the meat unsafe, and leaving them too long makes it tough.

“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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