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Pigeons with Rice and Parmesan Cheese

A pigeon dish stewed with onions, stock, and lemon, served over buttered rice and topped with Parmesan and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Pigeons with Rice and Parmesan Cheese

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Pick and wash the pigeons.

  2. Cut the pigeons into quarters.

Make the sauce and stew

  1. Brown the butter with the flour in a pan.

  2. Add the stock, onions, pepper, and salt to the pan.

  3. Stew the pigeons in the mixture until tender.

  4. Remove the pigeons from the pan and mix in the lemon juice.

Cook the rice and assemble

  1. Boil the rice in the stock with the butter, nutmeg, and salt until tender.

  2. Stir in the grated Parmesan cheese.

  3. Arrange more than half of the rice around the pigeons in the dish.

  4. Cover the pigeons with the remaining rice.

  5. Brush the top with a beaten egg.

  6. Sprinkle more Parmesan cheese over the top.

Bake

  1. Cover a baking tin with salt.

  2. Place the dish on the tin.

  3. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for about 45 minutes 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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + parmesan cheesetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 slow stewing.
Butter
Browned with flour to form a rich, nutty base for the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the browned butter into the sauce base.
Whole rice
Forms the starchy bed and covering that absorbs the stock and butter.
Parmesan cheese
Adds savory, salty flavor and helps the top brown and set.
Egg
Beaten and brushed on top, it helps the crust set and turn golden.

The step that matters

Brown the butter with the flour. Cooking the flour in butter until lightly browned develops flavor and removes raw starch taste, and it thickens the stock properly. Burning it leaves a bitter taste.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, lemon, rice, nutmeg, parmesan cheese):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, lemon, rice, nutmeg, parmesan cheese. 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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