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Pigeon Soup

A hearty soup made from pigeon meat, bones, vegetables, and spices simmered in gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot 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 ↓

Pigeon Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Roast the pigeons just enough to warm them through.

  2. Remove the meat from the bones and flour the bones well.

  3. Pound the bones in a mortar and stew them in 1½ pints of good gravy.

Make the soup

  1. Add the butter, onions, parsley, turnips, carrots, cayenne, and mace.

  2. Boil slowly for 2 hours.

  3. Strain the mixture through a colander and rub it through a sieve.

  4. Combine the strained mixture with the pigeon meat in a saucepan.

  5. Simmer for 1 hour and serve.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pigeons
Provide the meat that is returned to the soup and served in it.
Butter
Rolled in flour, it thickens the soup and adds richness and body.
Onions
Build savory flavor as they soften and cook into the stock over long simmering.
Turnips
Add body and mild sweetness as they cook down into the soup.
Carrots
Add sweetness and color as they cook down into the soup.

The step that matters

Straining and rubbing through a sieve. Pressing the cooked vegetables and bone-stewed liquid through a sieve breaks them down into a smooth body. Skipping or rushing this leaves the soup gritty and thin.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, onion, parsley, turnip, carrot, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, onion, parsley, turnip, carrot, pepper. 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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