Name: A Pigeon Pie
Ingredients: 1 pie crust; 2 pigeons, cleaned and picked; ½ teaspoon black pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); 2 tablespoons fresh butter; 1 hard-boiled egg yolk; 1 beef steak; water

Why it works: Pepper and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

A Pigeon Pie

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

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Make a pie crust and cover your dish with it.

Assemble

Season the cleaned pigeons with pepper and salt, and place a piece of butter inside each.
Lay the pigeons in a pan, adding the necks, gizzards, livers, pinions, and hearts around them.
Add the yolk of a hard-boiled egg and a beef steak in the center.
Pour in enough water to almost fill the dish.
Cover with the top crust and bake until golden brown.

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.

Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Butter + beeftop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,847 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Egg + beeftop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,305 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 and rich during the long bake.
Beef steak: Adds savoury meat flavour and body to the juices in the pie.
Butter: Adds fat that enriches the meat and gives a rich, savoury flavour.
Pie crust: Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form the golden top.
Hard-boiled egg yolk: Adds richness and a creamy texture to the filling.

“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.