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Pigeon

A pigeon compote stewed with gravy, onion, mushrooms, lemon, cloves, bacon, forcemeat, and thickened with a thickening agent.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Pigeon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Fill the pigeons with forcemeat.

  2. Blanch the pigeons.

  3. Place them in a pot with gravy, onion, mushrooms, lemon, cloves, and bacon.

  4. Stew until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. Strain the gravy.

  2. Remove the fat.

  3. Thicken with thickening.

  4. Add the forcemeat balls, hard yolks, and mushrooms to the gravy.

  5. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,663 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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 in the gravy.
Gravy
Supplies the liquid base that carries flavour and keeps the meat moist during stewing.
Hard yolks of eggs
Add richness and a firm, mealy texture to the finished sauce.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour that seasons the pigeons and gravy as they stew.
Thickening
Thickens the strained gravy into a smoother, more cohesive sauce.

The step that matters

Stew until tender. Pigeon is lean and can turn tough if cooked too hard or too fast. A gentle, prolonged simmer lets connective tissue break down, giving tender meat while the liquid stays at a bare simmer.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, lemon, clove, egg, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, lemon, clove, egg, pepper. 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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