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Soup with Pigeons and Poached Eggs

A savory soup made with pigeons, vegetables, veal broth, and poached eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Soup with Pigeons and Poached Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Truss the pigeons as for a pie and fill them halfway with forcemeat mixed with forced mushrooms.

  2. Scald and drain the pigeons, then place them in a stewpan with 1 pint of veal broth.

  3. Stew the pigeons until cooked through.

Make the soup

  1. In a separate pot, heat 2 quarts of veal broth and add the carrots, turnips, button onions, and celery.

  2. Steam the vegetables separately before adding them to the broth.

  3. Season the broth with salt and bring it to a boil.

  4. Five minutes before serving, add the cooked pigeons and a mixture of 4 eggs and ½ pint of cream to the broth.

  5. Serve with poached eggs in the tureen.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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 through slow stewing in broth.
Eggs
Thicken the broth gently when heated with cream, giving it a richer body.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the broth.
Veal broth
Forms the liquid base, carrying flavour and body through the whole soup.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and colour while softening in the broth.

The step that matters

Adding the egg and cream mixture. Egg proteins set when heated, so the mixture should be added off the boil and stirred in gently. If the broth is too hot, the eggs can curdle and the soup turns grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, veal, carrot, turnip, celery, egg, cream):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, veal, carrot, turnip, celery, egg, cream. 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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