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Another Way to Stew Pigeons

A stew of pigeons cooked with butter, water, lemon peel, mace, parsley, and finished with an egg yolk and cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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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 ↓

Another Way to Stew Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the pigeons

  1. Combine the pigeons, giblets, butter, water, lemon peel, mace, parsley, salt, and pepper in a stew pan.

  2. Cover the pan and stew until the pigeons are tender.

Finish the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix the egg yolk with the cream and add the butter dusted with flour.

  2. Thicken the sauce with this mixture and let it stew for an additional 10 minutes before serving.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 main meat, which becomes tender through slow, covered stewing.
Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce and gives it a smooth, rich texture when combined with cream.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce, softening its flavor when blended with the yolk.
Butter
Adds fat and richness; the flour-dusted portion helps thicken the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with the egg yolk and cream mixture. Egg yolk sets when heated, so adding it to a hot sauce too quickly or boiling it can cause curdling. Stirring it in gently and keeping the sauce at a gentle simmer helps it thicken smoothly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon, parsley, pepper, egg, cream, flour. 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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