Name: Pigeon Soup
Ingredients: 1 old pigeon; asparagus or young peas (to taste); ½ cup rice; water; coarse sea salt (to taste); raw yolks of eggs (optional, for serving)

Why it works: Asparagus and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 261 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pigeon Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

In a pot, add the old pigeon and flavor with asparagus or young peas.
Boil the rice in a little water and salt separately until half done.
Add the partially cooked rice to the pigeon soup and cook for an additional hour.

Serve

If desired, add raw yolks of eggs to the soup just before serving.

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.

Asparagus + ricetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together261 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Asparagus + eggtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,338 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Rice + eggtop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,350 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice: Thickens the soup as it cooks and adds body to the broth.
Raw egg yolks: Enrich the soup with richness and a smooth, silky texture when stirred in.

“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.