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Boiled Pigeons

Boiled pigeons served with butter, parsley, and a sauce thickened with egg yolk, cream, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 ↓

Boiled Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the pigeons

  1. Truss the pigeons like boiled fowls.

  2. Drop the pigeons into plenty of boiling water and add salt.

  3. Boil for 15 minutes, then lift them out.

  4. Pour melted butter and chopped parsley over the pigeons.

Serve with sauce

  1. Serve with a tureen of the sauce.

Stew and thicken

  1. Wash and clean the pigeons, cut into quarters, and place them in a stewpan with giblets, butter, water, lemon peel, mace, parsley, salt, and pepper.

  2. Cover and stew until tender.

  3. Thicken the sauce with beaten egg yolk, cream, and flour.

  4. Let stew for 10 more minutes 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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the pigeons and sauce.
Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce as it sets gently with heat, giving it a smooth body.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce with egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens by gentle heat, but if the sauce boils or gets too hot after it is added, the yolk can scramble and turn grainy. Add it off the heat or over low heat, stirring constantly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon, parsley, pepper, egg, cream, flour. 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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