Skip to main content
Main

Pigeon Pie

A savory pie made with pigeons, beef steak, ham, gizzards, wing joints, eggs, and a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Pigeon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Rub the pigeons inside and out with salt and pepper.

  2. Place a bit of butter and chopped parsley mixed with the livers inside each pigeon.

Assemble the pie

  1. Lay the beef steak at the bottom of a pie dish.

  2. Place the pigeons on top of the steak, adding a hard-boiled egg between each pair.

  3. Add ½ cup of water to the dish.

  4. If available, place a slice of ham on each pigeon for added flavor.

  5. Season the gizzards and wing joints, and place them in the center of the pie.

  6. Insert the cleaned pigeon feet through a hole in the crust to identify the pie.

Bake

  1. Cover the pie with a crust and bake until golden.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Beef + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,729 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Butter + hamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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 during the long moist baking.
Beef steak
Lies under the birds, adding savory beefy flavor and rich juices to the pie.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add firm, mild richness and body to the filling between the birds.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps carry the parsley and liver flavor.
Ham
Contributes salty, savory flavor to the pigeons as they cook.

The step that matters

Cover the pie with a crust and bake until golden. Baking until golden browns the crust through Maillard reactions and sets it, while the filling must cook through. Pulling the pie too early leaves the crust pale and the meat undercooked.

“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.

More pigeon pie recipes

Filling 3 See all 224 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes