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Roast Pigeons

Roasted pigeons stuffed with liver, bread crumbs, butter, onion, parsley, and spices, served with a sauce made from the birds' gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper 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 ↓

Roast Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Clean and truss the pigeons.

  2. Mince the livers and mix with bread crumbs, butter, onion, parsley, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  3. Fill the pigeons with the mixture and fasten a slice of bacon over each breast.

Roast and make the sauce

  1. Roast the pigeons until cooked through.

  2. Mix a little water with the gravy from the birds. Boil the mixture with a thickening. Season the sauce with pepper, salt, and chopped parsley.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 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, which cooks through in the oven while the stuffing steams inside.
Bread crumbs
Absorb butter and liver juices in the stuffing, giving it a soft, moist body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the stuffing, carrying flavour and keeping it moist.
Bacon
Lays fat over the breast so it bastes the meat and browns as it roasts.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the stuffing once it softens.

The step that matters

Boil the gravy with the thickening. Once the starch is added, the sauce must boil so the starch swells and thickens it fully. Undercooked starch leaves the gravy thin and floury tasting.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, parsley, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, parsley, pepper, nutmeg. 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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