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Piquant Sauce

A buttery herb sauce served over pigeons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Piquant Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Split the pigeons at the belly and remove the breast bone.

  2. Melt the butter in a stew pan over medium heat with thyme, parsley, shallots, mushrooms, pepper, and salt.

  3. Place the pigeons on a dish and pour the melted butter and herbs over them.

  4. Once the butter begins to cool, roll the pigeons in bread crumbs.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the breaded pigeons on a buttered sauté pan.

  2. Cook until the underside is nicely browned, then flip and brown the other side.

  3. Remove the pigeons and place them on a clean cloth to absorb excess butter.

  4. Serve the pigeons arranged around a dish with the sauce in the center.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

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 then cooked until browned on both sides.
Butter
Carries the herbs and aromatics and browns the pigeons in the pan.
Shallots
Add mild sweetness and aromatic depth to the butter sauce.
Mushrooms
Add earthy savory flavour and moisture to the sauce.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned coating on the outside of the pigeons.

The step that matters

Browning the breaded pigeons. Cook over steady heat so the crumb coating browns evenly without burning. Browning comes from the Maillard reaction between proteins and sugars at the surface, which needs dry heat. Blotting excess butter afterwards keeps the coating crisp.

“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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