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A sauce made with pigeon livers and hearts, butter, flour, giblet stock, and seasoned with salt, served with green peas or asparagus tips.

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 ↓

Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat a pan and remove the bacon from the pan.

  2. Add butter and flour to the pan, mixing until smooth.

  3. Pour in the stock from the giblets, stirring constantly until boiling.

  4. Add the livers and hearts, seasoning if necessary.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce with the pigeons and green peas or asparagus tips.

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. Butter + peastop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

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

  3. Butter + livertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Flour + peastop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,837 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Liver + peastop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

Butter
Provides fat and richness, and cooks with the flour to form the sauce's thickening base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce with the butter, giving it body and a smooth texture.
Stock from giblets
Forms the liquid of the sauce and carries the savoury flavour of the giblets.
Livers and hearts
Add rich, meaty flavour and a tender texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the stock into the roux. Adding the stock while stirring constantly disperses the butter and flour evenly into the liquid. Without this, the flour clumps and the sauce thickens unevenly.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, liver):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, liver. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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