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Broiled Pigeons

Broiled pigeons seasoned with sweet oil, salt, pepper, shallots, parsley, and bread crumbs, served with a lemon or vinegar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Broiled Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Split and flatten the pigeons.

  2. Make a seasoning with sweet oil, salt, pepper, shallots, and parsley. Rub it all over the pigeons.

  3. Cover the pigeons with grated bread crumbs.

  4. Wrap each pigeon in a sheet of white paper.

Broil and make the sauce

  1. Broil the pigeons over a slow fire.

  2. For the sauce, sauté minced onions in butter, then stir in flour, lemon juice or vinegar, salt, and pepper.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 is split and flattened so it cooks evenly.
Bread crumbs
Form a crust over the pigeons that helps them brown during broiling.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and flavor while the onions cook.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it becomes smooth and clings to the meat.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Broil the pigeons over a slow fire. A slow fire lets the heat reach the thick meat before the crumb coating and paper darken too much. Too fierce a heat can scorch the outside while the inside stays underdone.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, shallot, parsley, bread, butter, flour, lemon):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, shallot, parsley, bread, butter, flour, lemon. 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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