Skip to main content
Main

To Jug Pigeons

A dish of pigeons boiled in a jug with butter, wine, catsup, and herbs, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Jug Pigeons

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pigeons

  1. Pluck and draw the pigeons, wash them clean, and dry with a cloth.

  2. Season the pigeons with beaten mace, white pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Place the pigeons in a jug and add the butter.

  4. Seal the jug tightly with a cloth to prevent steam from escaping.

Boil and make the gravy

  1. Boil a kettle of water and place the jug in it, boiling for 1.5 hours.

  2. Remove the pigeons and pour the gravy into a pan.

  3. Add wine, catsup, lemon slice, chopped anchovy, and sweet herbs to the gravy.

  4. Boil the mixture briefly and thicken with butter rolled in flour.

Serve

  1. Arrange the pigeons in a dish and strain the gravy over them.

  2. Garnish with parsley and red cabbage.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Pigeons
Provide the meat, which cooks gently in its own juices and butter inside the sealed jug.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and with flour thickens the finished gravy.
Butter rolled in flour
Thickens the gravy, giving it body so it clings to the pigeons.
Anchovy
Adds savoury depth to the gravy without a distinctly fishy flavour.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the gravy, brightening the rich butter.

The step that matters

Sealing the jug tightly. A tight seal traps steam so the pigeons cook gently in their own moisture and butter. If steam escapes, the liquid reduces and the birds can dry out over the long cook.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, mace, wine, lemon, anchovy, flour, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mace, wine, lemon, anchovy, flour, parsley. 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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesRed CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipesStewed CabbageStewed Cabbage58 recipesBaked CabbageBaked Cabbage51 recipes