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Pigeon Pie

A savory pie made with pigeons, beef, butter, eggs, pepper, salt, and stock or water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pepper 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 ↓

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 the birds

  1. Pick and clean the pigeons thoroughly.

  2. Cut off the heads, truss the birds by turning the wings on their backs, and cut them in half.

  3. Place a piece of butter and a little pepper and salt inside each half bird.

Assemble the pie

  1. Put the beef in the bottom of a pie dish.

  2. Lay the pigeon halves on the beef, adding the gizzards, livers, and slices of hard‑boiled eggs around them.

  3. Add stock or water to the dish.

  4. Cover the dish and place the legs of the pigeons, with the feet upwards, in a hole made in the center of the pie crust.

Bake

  1. Bake for 1.5 hours at 400°F (200°C).

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. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Beef + eggtop 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 cooks gently in the dish's steam and juices.
Beef
Lies beneath the birds, releasing juices that flavour the stock and moisten the meat.
Butter
Placed inside the birds, it melts during baking to add richness and moisture.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add firm, mild richness and body to the filling around the birds.

The step that matters

Covering the dish before baking. A tight cover traps steam so the pigeons and beef cook through in moist heat; a loose cover lets juices evaporate and the meat dries out.

“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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