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To Boil Pigeons

A dish of boiled pigeons served with bacon, spinach, parsley garnish, and melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,025 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

To Boil Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Cook

  1. Boil the pigeons in water for 15 minutes.

  2. Cook the bacon until crispy and place it in the center of a serving dish.

  3. Stew the spinach and arrange it around the pigeons.

Serve

  1. Garnish with parsley and serve with melted butter.

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. Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  3. Spinach + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,583 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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 turns tender when gently simmered in water.
Bacon
Its rendered fat adds savoury flavour and richness to the dish.
Spinach
Adds leafy bulk and a mild, slightly bitter green flavour.

The step that matters

Boil the pigeons for 15 minutes. Boiling too hard or for too long toughens the muscle fibres and dries out the meat. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer helps the meat stay tender and moist.

Swap the spinach

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, butter. 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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