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Pigeon Currie

A pigeon curry simmered with spices, ghee, and tomato conserve, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pigeon Currie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. Fry onion, garlic, bay leaves, and cloves in ghee until brown.

  2. Add curry powder, cinnamon, mace, cardamom seeds, pigeons, and water; season with salt.

  3. Simmer gently for at least 1 hour.

  4. Stir in desiccated soup, tomato conserve, and a little gravy; simmer for another 30 minutes.

  5. Add lemon juice before serving and remove cinnamon and mace.

Serve

  1. Serve with rice.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + cardamomtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,299 recipes

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

  3. Clove + cardamomtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,114 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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 through long gentle simmering.
Ghee
Carries the spices and browns the onion, building savoury flavour in the base.
Onion
Browns in the fat to add sweetness and body to the sauce.
Desiccated soup
Adds savoury depth and body to the gravy as it simmers.
Tomato conserve
Adds acidity and concentrated sweetness that rounds out the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity at the end to brighten the rich, spiced sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for at least 1 hour. A gentle simmer lets the tough connective tissue in the pigeon break down slowly, giving tender meat. A hard boil toughens and dries the meat and can make the sauce reduce unevenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, garlic, ghee, cinnamon, cardamom, tomato):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, garlic, ghee, cinnamon, cardamom, tomato. 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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