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Potted Pigeon

A dish of pigeon meat cooked in butter, seasoned, shredded, and set in a pot with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Potted Pigeon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and prepare the pigeon.

  2. In a pan, melt the butter and add the pigeon.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and mixed herbs.

  4. Cook until the pigeon is tender.

Make the potted pigeon

  1. Remove from heat and let cool.

  2. Shred the meat and mix with lemon juice.

  3. Pack into a pot and cover with melted butter.

  4. Refrigerate until set.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pigeon
Provides the main meat that is cooked, shredded and packed into the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, cooks the meat gently, and forms a sealing layer on top.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and meat flavour.

The step that matters

Cook until the pigeon is tender. Pigeon meat is firm and can turn dry or tough if overcooked. It must be fully tender before shredding, because the texture of the finished potted meat depends on it.

“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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