Skip to main content
Main

A Pigeon Pie

A savory pie made with pigeons, beef steak, egg yolk, butter, and puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

A Pigeon Pie

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. Prepare a puff pastry crust and cover the dish.

Assemble

  1. Season the cleaned pigeons inside with salt and pepper, and place a piece of butter in each.

  2. Lay the pigeons in a pan, placing the necks, gizzards, livers, pinions, and hearts between them.

  3. Add the yolk of a hard-boiled egg and a beef steak in the middle.

  4. Pour in enough water to almost fill the dish.

Bake

  1. Cover with the top crust and bake at 400°F (200°C) until well cooked.

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

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

  2. Butter + beeftop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Egg + beeftop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 cooks in the pastry and braising liquid.
Beef steak
Adds meaty flavour to the juices as it cooks in the dish.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and moisture to the pigeons as it melts during baking.
Hard-boiled egg yolk
Adds richness and a creamy texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Cover with the top crust and bake until well cooked. The pastry must be sealed over the dish so steam stays in and the meat cooks through. Puff pastry needs a hot oven to rise and brown, while the filling needs enough time to become tender.

“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