Name: To Pot Pigeons
Ingredients: 2 to 3 fresh pigeons; Coarse sea salt; Black pepper; Butter; Thick paper for covering

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Pot Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Clean the pigeons carefully and season them with salt and pepper.
Place them closely in a small deep pan.
Cover the pigeons with butter and then with thick paper tied down.

Bake and pot

Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until cooked.
Once cooled, transfer the pigeons to pots, ensuring they fit two to three in each.
Pour the baked butter over the pigeons, ensuring a thick layer if they are to be stored.

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 + buttertop 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

Fresh pigeons: Provide the meat that is slowly cooked until tender in the sealed pan.
Butter: Covers the birds and bakes into a rich fat that moistens the meat and seals it for storage.

“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.