Skip to main content
Main

To Stew Pigeons

A stew of pigeons stuffed with liver, breadcrumbs, egg yolks, herbs, butter, and served in a cream and stock sauce with mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,973 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Stew Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Prepare the pigeons and mince their livers.

  2. Mix the livers with bread crumbs, chopped egg yolks, lemon peel, thyme, and savory.

  3. Stuff the pigeons with the mixture and add a small piece of butter to each.

Stew

  1. Place the pigeons in a stewpan and cover with bouillon or stock.

  2. Stew gently for 30 minutes.

  3. Remove the pigeons and strain the sauce.

  4. Thicken the sauce with cream and beaten egg yolks, then season with pepper and salt.

  5. Heat the pigeons in the sauce for 1 minute before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve the pigeons in the sauce with pickled or stewed mushrooms around the dish.

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. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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 stuffed and gently stewed until tender.
Bread crumbs
Absorb juices in the stuffing, giving it a moist, binding texture.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce when beaten in, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the sauce, rounding its flavour and body.
Bouillon or stock
Forms the cooking liquid that becomes the savoury base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated but can scramble and curdle if the sauce boils, so keep it below a simmer while stirring.

Swap the thyme

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, bread, egg, lemon, butter, cream, pepper):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Sagefits about as well
  4. Thymethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, bread, egg, lemon, butter, cream, pepper. 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.

More pigeon stew recipes

with Cabbage 3with Green Peas 3with Peas 3 See all 101 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes