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Fried Pigeons
4 pigeons, 1/2 pound sausage meat, 1 egg, carrot, turnip, onion, celery, mace, and cloves. Empty and split pigeons in halves, lengthways; remove 1 joint of wing and of leg, and truss neatly; wash thoroughly.
Put into a stewpan, a small bit turnip and carrot, small onion, bit of celery, blade of mace, few cloves and whole peppers; place pigeons on top; add 2 cups water, and all giblets of pigeons nicely cleaned and prepared; cover all with Criscoed paper and cover them with lid, and cook gently 1 hour. Remove pigeons from pan, and dry each thoroughly. Divide sausage into 4 portions; fill hollow of pigeons with these, and with floured hands pat it quite smooth, using flour all over pigeons. Have an egg well beaten; cover carefully with it, and roll in fine breadcrumbs. Put into hot Crisco, and fry a golden brown. Have the following sauce in dish, and place the pigeons neatly in center: Strain liquor pigeons were stewed in, and into pan put 1 tablespoon flour and 1 tablespoon Crisco, moisten it with a little cold water; then add to it the liquor, a 1/4 teaspoon meat extract, 1 small tomato chopped up, and salt to taste; let all boil for 10 minutes; then strain. It may require more stock or water to be added to make sauce a good consistency.
A two-stage dish: the birds are gently braised, then stuffed with sausage, breaded and fried. The braising liquid becomes the sauce, so keep it.
- The hinge: cooking the sausage throughRaw pork sausage patted onto a freshly braised bird will not reach a safe temperature in the few minutes it takes the crumbs to brown. Fry to colour, then finish the birds in a 375F oven until the sausage reads 160F at its thickest point.
- CriscoCrisco is vegetable shortening, and this book was written to promote it. Any neutral frying fat works; for the sauce roux, butter is better.
- "Criscoed paper"A round of greased paper laid directly on the food, what a French kitchen calls a cartouche. Parchment cut to fit the pan does the same job under the lid.
- Buying the birdsAsk for squab, farmed young pigeon, sold whole at 12-16 oz each. Do not substitute wild birds; most North American wild pigeons and doves are regulated game and several species are protected outright.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one whole piece, usually reckoned as somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon ground. Ground mace works but will cloud the stock, so strain well.
- Meat extractA quarter teaspoon means concentrated beef extract of the Bovril or Liebig type. A commercial beef base or a spoonful of reduced demi-glace stands in; ordinary bouillon powder is far weaker and much saltier.
- Frying temperatureThe crumb coating wants 350-375F. Any hotter and the egg wash scorches before the coating sets; any cooler and it drinks fat.
- YieldFour birds split in half serve four as a main course, or eight as a first course. The strained sauce is a small quantity, and the recipe itself allows that more stock or water may be needed to bring it to a good consistency.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to persuade American cooks that their new hydrogenated shortening belonged in every recipe, which is why Crisco appears here three times, including in the odd instruction to grease the pan paper with it. The dish itself is much older than the fat: braising small birds and then breading and frying them is a standard nineteenth-century treatment, and "pigeons in surtout" or stuffed with forcemeat runs through English cookery books from Hannah Glasse onward. Pigeon was cheap and ordinary food in Britain and the eastern United States well into the twentieth century, kept in dovecotes for the young birds; its retreat to the restaurant menu came later, as poultry farming made chicken the cheaper bird.