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Raised Pigeon Pie, Hot Water Pastry

A pie made with pigeon, sausage, and various accompaniments baked in a hot water pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and pistachio match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 195 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Raised Pigeon Pie, Hot Water Pastry

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Grease a raised pie tin and line it with pastry.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill with layers of pigeon, sausage meat, and other ingredients.

  2. Add a little stock and cover with a lid of pastry.

  3. Make a hole in the center and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 1.5 to 2 hours.

Finish and decorate

  1. Fill up with good stock, remove the tin, and let it cool.

  2. Take off the lid, brush the outside with glaze, and decorate the top with chopped jelly.

  3. Glaze the forcemeat balls and pigeon's feet, then arrange them on top of the pie.

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. Walnut + pistachiotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together195 recipes

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

  2. Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

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

  3. Flour + pistachiotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together505 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Walnut + nutstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

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

  5. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the pastry that encloses the filling and holds the pie's raised shape.
Pigeon
Provides the main meat and rich flavour of the filling.
Sausages
Adds fat and savoury seasoning to the filling, keeping the meat moist.
Stock
Adds moisture to the filling and sets to a savoury jelly as the pie cools.
Chopped jelly
Adds glossy decoration and a sweet-savoury gel on the pie's top.

The step that matters

Fill the pie with stock after baking. Stock poured in after baking replaces steam lost during cooking, so the pie stays moist and the gelatine in the stock sets as it cools.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, pepper, walnut, ham, pistachio):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, walnut, ham, pistachio. 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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