Clean and season some young pigeons. Stuff each with chopped oysters and bits of butter and let stew until tender with 1 onion, 2 sprigs of parsley and 1 bay-leaf. Then line a deep pie-dish with a rich paste; let bake and fill with the stuffed pigeons. Add the sauce; cover with the paste and let bake until brown. Serve hot.
A compressed version of a very old English pie: the birds are stewed first, then baked in a crust that has already been part-baked. The instructions collapse two separate oven stages into one line, so read the order carefully before you start.
- The hinge: two bakes, not one"Line a deep pie-dish with a rich paste; let bake" means blind-bake the lower crust before filling it. Fill with the birds and their sauce, put the lid on, and return it to the oven only until the top is browned — the filling is already cooked.
- Pigeons"Young pigeons" means squab, generally sold around a pound or under dressed and available from game butchers and some Asian markets. Adult wood pigeon is much tougher and darker and needs longer braising; farmed squab should be tender after roughly half an hour to an hour of gentle stewing, depending on size.
- Oyster stuffingChop the oysters coarsely and mix them with cold butter, then pack the cavities loosely. Oysters toughen within a couple of minutes of direct heat, but inside the bird and under liquid they stay soft; do not add extra oysters to the sauce at the end unless you slip them in during the last minute.
- "Rich paste"The term is loose, but it usually points to a butter-rich short crust, or butter mixed with lard, rather than a leaf-puff pastry. Around 12 oz flour to 7 oz fat will line a deep dish and give a lid.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives none. As a modern working guide, blind-bake the lining at 400F until set and pale gold, roughly 20 minutes with weights; the final bake to brown the lid at 400-425F for 20-25 minutes. Brush with egg wash if you want colour faster.
- The sauceThe stewing liquid as it stands is thin and will soak the pastry. Strain out the onion, parsley and bay, reduce it hard, and thicken it lightly with a beurre manié so it sets to a gravy in the pie rather than a puddle.
- Stewing liquidThe recipe never says what to stew in. Barely cover the birds with light stock — veal or chicken — or half stock and half dry cider, which suits both the pigeon and the oysters.
- YieldTwo birds fill a 9-inch deep dish and serve four; three or four birds in a larger dish will stretch to six or eight. Serve the legs whole and carve the breasts off the bone at the table if the birds are left intact.
Pigeon pie was long a fixture of English country cooking, because a dovecote produced meat through much of the year with no pasture and no slaughtering season — squabs were taken from the nest before they flew. Combining the birds with oysters, as here, was a familiar eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice, when barrelled oysters were cheap enough to serve as a bulking and seasoning ingredient rather than a luxury; the same logic put them into steak pies and into stuffed turkeys. The date, November 5, is Guy Fawkes Night, which may be the compiler's reason for placing an English recipe in that slot, though the surrounding entries are not otherwise arranged around national anniversaries.