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Pigeons a LA Crapaudine

Pigeons cooked with butter, herbs, mushrooms, and breadcrumbs, served with sauce piquante.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Pigeons a LA Crapaudine

4 to 6 pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Split the pigeons and remove the breast, leg, thigh, and wing bones. Flatten the pigeons using a meat mallet.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter with the herbs, mushrooms, pepper, and salt. Place the pigeons on a dish and pour the melted butter over them.

  3. Once the butter cools slightly, roll the pigeons in bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a sauté pan with clarified butter and fry the pigeons until browned on one side. Turn the pigeons and brown the other side.

  2. Drain excess butter on a cloth and serve the pigeons on a dish with sauce piquante in the center.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  3. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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 is flattened so it cooks evenly and quickly.
Butter
Carries the herbs and enriches the coating, adding richness and helping the crumbs brown.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns in the hot fat and protects the meat.
Mushrooms
Add savory, earthy flavor and moisture to the buttered coating.
Shallot
Adds mild, sweet onion-like aroma to the butter mixture.

The step that matters

Frying the coated pigeons. The crumb coating browns quickly in hot clarified butter, so the heat must be high enough to crisp the crumbs while the thin, flattened meat cooks through. Too little heat leaves the coating greasy and pale; too much burns it before the meat is done.

Swap the thyme

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, shallot, parsley, mushroom, pepper, bread, sauce):

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Thymethe original
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, shallot, parsley, mushroom, pepper, bread, sauce. 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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