Skip to main content
Main

Roast Pigeons

Roasted pigeons stuffed with bread crumbs, herbs, and salt pork, served with a wine and stock gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Marjoram and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,075 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Roast Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the stuffing

  1. If stuffing, mix bread crumbs, marjoram, pepper, salt, cloves, onion, salt pork, and eggs in a bowl.

Roast the pigeons

  1. Stuff the pigeons, sew them up, and truss tightly.

  2. Roast pigeons at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes, basting with butter and a strip of salt pork pinned to the breast.

Make the gravy

  1. For gravy, combine drippings, meat stock, butter, flour, red wine, and cloves in a saucepan.

  2. Bring the gravy to a boil.

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. Marjoram + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Marjoram + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  5. Onion + porktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

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 roasted whole, stuffed, and trussed.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and fat in the stuffing, giving it body and a soft texture.
Eggs
Bind the stuffing ingredients together so they hold their shape when cooked.
Flour
Thickens the drippings and stock into a smooth gravy.
Butter
Adds fat for basting, promoting browning and a rich flavor on the skin.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, marjoram, pepper, clove, pork, egg, butter):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, marjoram, pepper, clove, pork, egg, 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes