Skip to main content
Main

Soup with Pigeons and Poached Eggs

A hearty soup made with pigeons, forcemeat, mushrooms, veal broth, vegetables, and poached eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Soup with Pigeons and Poached Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Truss the pigeons and fill them halfway with forcemeat mixed with pounded mushrooms.

  2. Scald the pigeons, then drain the pigeons.

  3. Place the pigeons in a stew pan with 1 pint of veal broth.

  4. Stew the pigeons until cooked through.

Make the soup

  1. Heat 2 quarts of veal broth in a separate pot.

  2. Steam the chopped carrots, turnips, button onions, and celery separately.

  3. Add the steamed vegetables to the broth.

  4. Season the broth with salt and bring it to a boil.

  5. Five minutes before serving, add the cooked pigeons and a mixture of 4 eggs and ½ cup cream to the broth.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup with 2 poached eggs in each bowl.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten with cream and stirred into the hot broth, they thicken it into a silky, lightly set body.
Forcemeat
A seasoned meat stuffing that cooks inside the pigeons, keeping them moist and flavourful.
Veal broth
The liquid base that gives the soup its savoury, meaty depth.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, softening the flavour and smoothing the texture of the egg mixture.
Pigeons
The main meat, whose flesh and juices give the soup its rich, gamey character.

The step that matters

Adding the egg and cream mixture to the broth. If the broth is at a hard boil when the eggs go in, the proteins tighten and curdle into lumps instead of setting into a smooth, silky texture. Keep the broth hot but not boiling, and stir while adding.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, veal, carrot, turnip, celery, egg, cream):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, veal, carrot, turnip, celery, egg, cream. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipes