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Roast Pigeons

Roast pigeons are cooked with water, butter, salt, pepper, and flour for gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Roast Pigeons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dress the pigeons.

  2. Wash the pigeons.

  3. Stuff the pigeons as you would for roasting.

  4. Add 2 teaspoons of butter to each pigeon.

  5. Season each pigeon with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

Roast

  1. Place them in a pan with ½ cup of water to prevent burning.

  2. Baste the pigeons well.

  3. Cook the pigeons for 45 minutes.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Thicken the gravy with a little flour.

  2. Boil the gravy for a moment.

  3. Pour the gravy into a gravy bowl.

  4. Arrange the pigeons closely together on a serving dish.

  5. Serve immediately.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Pigeons
Main protein; cooks through in the pan and is basted to stay moist.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the birds as they roast.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices into a gravy.

The step that matters

Baste the pigeons well. Spooning the fat and pan juices over the birds keeps the surface moist and helps it brown, so the meat does not dry out during the 45-minute roast.

“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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