Roast Pigeons
Prepare and roast the same as chickens. Pigeons should not be kept more than six hours after being killed, as they lose their flavor by being kept too long.
A recipe of two sentences that assumes you already know how to roast a chicken and have a bird less than a day old. Both assumptions need work now.
- What to buyDomestic squab — a young pigeon of about 12 to 16 oz — is sold frozen by game butchers and some Asian markets. It is the closest thing to what this book meant. Dove and some wild pigeon are taken under hunting seasons and bag limits, though rules vary widely by species and place; buy farmed rather than trying to source wild.
- The six-hour ruleThis reflects a household that killed its own birds, and it is the opposite of the advice for larger game, which was hung for days. Whatever the reason the book had in mind, a modern equivalent is simply to use fresh squab within a day or two of purchase, or cook straight from a good frozen state.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven instruction, only 'the same as chickens.' Squab are small and lean, and a long moderate roast dries them out before the skin colours, so treat this as a hot-oven bird — about 450F.
- TimingA whole squab at 450F takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes, not the hour a chicken would want. Give it 10 minutes' rest before carving.
- BardingSquab has almost no covering fat, so it wants a sheet of salt pork or bacon over the breast, or frequent basting with butter — as many period roast-bird recipes direct.
- DonenessSquab is traditionally served with the breast pink, around 135–140F at the thickest part. If you want the USDA figure for poultry, that is 165F, which will give you a firm, fully cooked bird rather than the restaurant version.
- YieldOne bird per person as a main course, half a bird as a first course. The recipe gives no quantity at all.
Pigeon was ordinary fare in nineteenth-century American cookery, which is why the instructions are so brief ook expects the dish to be familiar and only bothers to warn about freshness. Squab were kept rather than hunted: dovecotes and pigeon lofts had been a fixture of European and colonial households for centuries, valued because the young birds fatten in the nest and can be taken at a predictable size without the labour of pasture or feed. The wild passenger pigeon, netted in enormous numbers through the middle of the century and cheap enough to be a poor man's meat, had collapsed as a market bird by the 1880s, with the species surviving in the wild only to about 1900, and farmed squab took up much of the trade. Its later reputation as a luxury has more to do with that scarcity of supply and the labour of raising the birds than with any change in the meat itself.