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Another Way to Stew Pigeons

A stew of pigeons cooked with butter, flour, gravy or water, and seasoned with pepper, salt, parsley, and optional spinach, finished with hard‑boiled egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Another Way to Stew Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the pigeons and truss them as for boiling.

  2. Season the inside with pepper and salt.

Stew

  1. In a saucepan, brown the butter with the flour.

  2. Add enough gravy or water to nearly cover the pigeons.

  3. Add the pigeons along with the livers, gizzards, pinions, salt, and minced parsley.

  4. If desired, add spinach.

  5. Let them stew for 45 minutes.

  6. A few minutes before serving, add the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Pepper + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Flour + spinachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 as it stews slowly in liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour, and browns to a nutty taste when cooked with flour.
Flour
Thickens the braising liquid into a gravy when browned with the butter.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Enrich the sauce with a creamy, thickening texture when added near the end.

The step that matters

Browning the butter with the flour. Cooking the flour in butter until it turns golden creates a roux. Cooking it too little leaves a raw floury taste and weak thickening, while cooking it too long can scorch it and turn the gravy bitter.

Swap the spinach

The recipe marks spinach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, flour, liver, parsley, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, flour, liver, parsley, egg. 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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