Name: Pigeon Pie
Ingredients: 3 young pigeons; 2 hard boiled eggs; 1 lb steak; 2 teaspoons salt; 1 pint good stock; 1 teaspoon pepper; ½ lb best flaky pastry

Why it works: Egg and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pigeon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

Prepare the steak as for beef steak pie.
Lay the steak at the bottom of a pie dish.
Cut the pigeons into quarters.
Sprinkle the pigeon quarters with salt and pepper.
Lay the pigeon quarters over the steak.
Cut the hard boiled eggs into eight pieces each.
Pile the egg pieces on top of the pigeons.
Half fill the dish with stock.

Bake

Cover the dish with pastry.
Bake for about 1.5 hours.

Add the feet

Scald and cleanse the feet of the pigeons.
Stick the cleaned feet into the pastry after the pie has baked for about one hour.

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.

Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together50,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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 during the long bake.
Steak: Adds rich meaty flavor and body to the filling as it cooks under the pastry.
Hard boiled eggs: Add richness and a soft, creamy texture to the filling.
Stock: Supplies moisture that cooks the meat and forms a savory gravy in the dish.
Flaky pastry: Its layers of fat create a crisp, flaky crust that seals the filling.

“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.