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Braised Pigeons with Mushrooms

Braised pigeons stuffed with breadcrumbs and pork fat, simmered 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 and wash the pigeons, then stuff them with a mixture of breadcrumbs, chopped fat pork, onion juice, salt, and pepper.

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

Braise

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

  2. Remove the pigeons and keep them warm.

Make the gravy and serve

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

  2. Simmer for five minutes, then thicken with brown roux, boil briefly, 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 slow, moist braising.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb juices in the stuffing, keeping it moist and giving it body.
Fat pork
Adds fat that enriches the stuffing and carries flavour into the meat.
Mushrooms
Contribute savoury, earthy flavour to the gravy.
Brown roux
Thickens the gravy so it coats the pigeons.

The step that matters

Cooking the pigeons gently until tender. Cooking gently with a lid keeps the moisture in and lets tough connective tissue break down slowly. Boiling would tighten the muscle fibres and leave the meat dry and chewy.

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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