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Pigeon Soup

A soup made from roasted pigeon meat and bones simmered with vegetables, herbs, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 824 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pigeon Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Roast the pigeons for 10 minutes, then remove the fleshy parts.

  2. Pound the bones with flour in a mortar.

Make the stock

  1. Stew the bones with gravy, butter, onions, shallots, herbs, turnips, and carrots over low heat.

  2. Season with cayenne pepper and mace, and boil gently for 2 hours.

  3. Strain the mixture through a colander and then through a fine sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Return the strained liquid to a pot with the fleshy parts of the pigeons.

  2. Simmer for 1 hour and serve.

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. Tarragon + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Shallot + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together266 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Shallot + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Tarragon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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, with the bones adding deep flavour to the stock.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and gives the soup a richer mouthfeel.
Onions
Build a sweet, savoury base as they soften and release their flavour into the stock.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the soup as they cook down.
Turnips
Contribute earthy sweetness and body to the stock during slow stewing.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base, supplying savoury depth to the stock.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 2 hours. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer extracts flavour from the bones and vegetables without breaking up the fat. A hard boil makes the broth cloudy and greasy and can toughen the pigeon meat added later.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, shallot, tarragon, chervil, parsley, basil):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, shallot, tarragon, chervil, parsley, basil. 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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