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Boiled Pigeon or Partridge

A boiled pigeon or partridge wrapped in puff pastry, served with bread sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,964 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Pigeon or Partridge

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the bird and season it with salt and pepper.

  2. Enclose the bird in puff pastry.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for 20 to 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the pastry and serve the bird in its own gravy with bread sauce.

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. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Bread + saucetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,934 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Pepper + saucetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Pepper and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Pigeon or partridge
Provides the main meat, which firms and turns opaque as it cooks in the liquid.
Puff pastry
Wraps the bird to hold it during boiling, then is removed before serving.

The step that matters

Boiling time. The bird cooks gently in simmering liquid. Boiling it past the stated time toughens the meat and dries out its fibres, so check it near the end of the range.

“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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