Skip to main content
Main

To Roast Pigeons

Roasted pigeons seasoned with butter and cayenne, served with brown gravy, watercress, and parsley butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and watercress work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Roast Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the heads, necks, and toes from the pigeons.

  2. Carefully draw the pigeons, avoiding breaking the gall-bladders, and rinse them with plenty of water.

  3. Wipe the pigeons dry and place a small bit of butter dipped in cayenne inside each bird.

  4. Truss the wings over the backs.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast the pigeons at a brisk fire, basting constantly with butter.

  2. Roast for about 18 to 20 minutes, longer if the pigeons are large.

  3. Serve with brown gravy and a tureen of parsley and butter on the side.

  4. For a second course, serve on a bed of young watercress.

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 + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Butter + watercresstop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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 quickly over high heat and stays tender when not overcooked.
Butter
Adds moisture and richness, and as it bastes the bird it promotes gentle browning and flavor.
Cayenne pepper
Adds gentle heat and aroma that the butter carries into the meat during roasting.

The step that matters

Basting constantly with butter during roasting. Butter that runs off or the bird drying out leads to dry meat and uneven browning. Frequent basting keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly over the brisk heat.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes