Name: Roast Pigeon
Ingredients: 1 tame pigeon; 1 tablespoon chopped liver; 1 slice fat bacon; 1 vine leaf; Ravigotte sauce, shallot, or Italian sauce for serving

Why it works: Liver and sauce work together. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 499 recipes. Both carry decanoic acid, which smells soapy, waxy. The science ↓

Roast Pigeon

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Chop the liver and fat bacon together.
Stuff the mixture inside the pigeon.
Cover with a vine leaf and tie a slice of bacon over it.

Roast and serve

Roast in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 30 minutes.
Serve with ravigotte, shallot, or Italian sauce.

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.

Liver + saucetop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together499 recipes

Shared aroma: decanoic acid (soapy, waxy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Tame pigeon: Forms the main body of the dish, cooked whole and stuffed.
Chopped liver: Adds rich, savory flavor to the stuffing as it roasts.
Fat bacon: Adds fat that bastes the bird and keeps the meat moist as it roasts.

“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.