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To Pot Pigeons

Fresh pigeons are baked with butter, salt, and pepper, then stored in pots with the butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Pot Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the pigeons carefully and season them with salt and pepper.

  2. Lay the pigeons close together in a small deep pan.

  3. Cover the pigeons with butter.

  4. Cover the pigeons with thick paper tied down.

Bake and pot

  1. Bake the pigeons until cooked through.

  2. Once cold, place them in pots that hold 2 or 3 pigeons each.

  3. Pour the baked butter over the pigeons, ensuring it is thick if they are to be stored.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Covers the pigeons and bakes into a thick fat that seals them for storage.
Fresh pigeons
Provide the main meat that cooks through during baking.

The step that matters

Pour the baked butter over the pigeons while it is still thick enough to seal. Butter sets firm as it cools and forms a fat layer that excludes air, which helps the pigeons keep when stored. If the butter is too thin, it will not form a proper seal.

“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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