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Pigeons a LA Crapandine

Pigeons à la Crapandine is a roasted pigeon dish served with a poor man's sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and 85,512 recipes mention both. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Truss the legs of the pigeons and cut the flesh off the breast by sliding a knife at the side of the leg up to the wing joint.

  2. Turn the breast over and flatten the body with the handle of a knife.

  3. Melt a bit of butter in a large stewpan and add salt and black pepper.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the pigeons in the pan with their breasts down and turn them occasionally.

  2. When three-fourths done, drain the pigeons and place them on a grill over low heat.

  3. Cook until they have a nice color and serve with sauce à la pauvre homme.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Butter + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together85,512 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Pigeons
Provide the meat, which is seared and then finished gently so it browns without drying out.
Butter
Carries heat evenly in the pan and adds fat for browning and rich flavor.

The step that matters

Finishing on the grill over low heat. Pigeon meat is lean and dries out quickly. Partly cooking it in butter first and then finishing gently over low heat lets it brown while staying moist inside.

“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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