Skip to main content
Main

To Boil Pigeons

A boiled pigeon dish seasoned with bacon, butter, parsley, pepper, and sea salt, garnished with broccoli.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

To Boil Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Draw the pigeons and remove the craw carefully.

  2. Wash the pigeons in several waters and cut off the pinions.

  3. Turn the legs under the wings and place in a pot with cold water.

Boil

  1. Add the bacon on top to keep them moist and boil slowly for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Dish the pigeons and pour melted butter over them.

  2. Garnish with broccoli and serve with melted butter and 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 + broccolitop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together653 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + broccolitop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,747 recipes

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

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Pigeons
The main protein; boiling slowly keeps the meat tender rather than tough.
Fat bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor, and its placement on top helps keep the birds moist as they cook.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the finished birds a smooth, savory coating.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for 15 minutes. A gentle simmer cooks the meat through while keeping it tender; a hard boil toughens muscle fibers and can dry out the birds.

Swap the broccoli

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Broccolithe original

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

More boiled pigeons recipes

with Bacon 3 See all 19 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes