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Preserve

Hot Pigeon Pie

A savory pie made with pigeons, onions, carrots, celery, and a butter‑flour sauce, topped with puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Hot Pigeon Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the filling

  1. Bone the pigeons and brown them in butter.

  2. Stew the pigeons with sliced onions, carrots, celery, salt, and pepper.

  3. After removing the pigeons, stir 2 tablespoons of flour into the butter until smooth. Gradually add 2 cups of hot water, then return the pigeons to the pot and cook slowly until tender.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a baking dish, cover with puff pastry, and cut slits in the center for steam to escape. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 25 minutes.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 stewing.
Butter
Browns the pigeons and forms the base for the flour thickener, adding richness.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce as it is stirred into the butter.
Puff pastry
Forms a crisp, flaky, browned crust over the filling as it bakes.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma to the stewing liquid as they soften.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour into the butter. Stirring flour into the butter and adding hot water gradually keeps the sauce smooth, because flour added to hot liquid all at once clumps. Cooking it briefly also removes the raw flour taste.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, celery, pepper, 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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