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Broiled Pigeons or Squabs
Split down the back and broil as you would chickens; seasoning with salt, pepper, and butter. Broil slices of pork and place over each bird and serve.
A three-line recipe that assumes you know how to broil a chicken over coals and can buy pigeons by the pair. The gaps worth filling are the bird itself, the pork, and the heat.
- What a squab isA squab is a young pigeon, four weeks old or less, never flown, weighing about 12-16 oz. It is dark-meated and tender; an older pigeon is a stewing bird and will not broil. Order squab from a game dealer or a Chinese butcher, where they are sold routinely.
- Split down the backThis is spatchcocking: cut through the backbone with shears, open the bird out, and press it flat, cracking the breastbone if it resists. Flat birds cook evenly under fierce heat, which is the whole point of the instruction.
- "Broil" means direct high heatIn this period, a gridiron over coals. A modern broiler set high with the rack 4-5 inches from the element does the same job, as does a hot grill. Start skin side away from the heat, then finish skin up to crisp it.
- TimingA flattened squab takes roughly 10-14 minutes total under a hot broiler. Squab is conventionally served with the breast still pink at about 140-145F; if you want the 165F the USDA specifies for poultry, expect dry breast meat and cook to that number knowingly.
- Slices of porkThis most likely means fresh side pork or salt pork cut thin rather than modern bacon, though bacon is the closest substitute. Broil it separately until the fat is rendered and it has begun to crisp, then lay it over the finished bird so the fat runs down into the meat.
- Salt pork needs rinsingIf you use genuine salt pork, rinse and pat it dry before broiling, or the combination of cured pork and the salt seasoning on the bird will be overwhelming.
- ButterBrush the birds with melted butter before and during broiling rather than dotting it on. Butter over direct heat will darken quickly, so keep the birds moving and baste rather than flood.
- YieldOne squab per person as a main course, two if the birds are small or the rest of the meal is light. Serve on toast, which was the standard bed of the period and catches the juices and pork fat.
Pigeons were among the most ordinary meats in American cookery well into the nineteenth century, when passenger pigeons arrived in flocks large enough to be netted and barreled by the thousand; that bird was extinct by 1914, and the squab of this book is the domesticated rock pigeon, raised in lofts as a commercial squab industry that flourished in the United States from the 1890s onward. The word squab is generally traced to a Scandinavian root suggesting something soft or plump, and it came to mean specifically a nestling pigeon taken before it fledges, when the flight muscles are still tender. That the recipe is so bare tells you the reader was expected to know the method already. The strip of pork laid over each bird is the same logic as barding a partridge or a grouse: lean, dark game birds have almost no fat of their own, and the period fixed that with pork rather than with basting alone.