Name: Pigeon Pie
Ingredients: 2 pigeons; pepper; coarse sea salt; butter; parsley; 2 hard-boiled eggs; 1 beef steak; 1 cup water; ham (optional)

Why it works: Pepper and parsley 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 ↓

Pigeon Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the birds

Rub the pigeons inside and out with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Place a bit of butter and chopped parsley mixed with the liver inside each pigeon.

Assemble the pie

Lay a beef steak at the bottom of a pie dish.
Place the pigeons on the steak, adding a hard-boiled egg between each pair.
Pour 1 cup of water into the dish and add pieces of ham on top of each pigeon if desired.
Season the gizzards and two wing joints, placing them in the center of the pie.
Insert three cleaned feet into a hole in the crust to identify the pie.
Cover with a pie crust and bake until golden.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together28,563 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Beef + hamtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,729 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
Butter + hamtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,475 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 cooks tender in the moist, enclosed pie.
Beef steak: Lines the dish and adds savory meat flavor as it cooks into the juices.
Hard-boiled eggs: Add rich, firm texture and mild flavor between the pigeons.
Butter: Adds fat and richness to the birds as they cook.

“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.