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Stewed Squabs
Cut 2 squabs into neat joints. Put 1 cup water in saucepan when it boils lay in squabs, 1 sliced onion, and 1 slice of carrot, simmer for 1 1/2 hours. Blend 2 tablespoons Crisco with 2 tablespoons flour, add 1 cup stock from squabs, salt and pepper to taste and boil for 5 minutes stirring all the time. Arrange the squabs on a hot dish and strain over the sauce.
A plain braise from a Crisco-sponsored menu book, written when squab was ordinary butcher's meat. The main thing to fix is the cooking time.
- Time down, not upSquab is young pigeon, slaughtered before it flies, and its meat is tender to begin with. An hour and a half of simmering leaves it dry and stringy; jointed squab is done in 25 to 35 minutes at a bare simmer, and the breast is at its best pulled at the shorter end.
- What a squab isA butchered pigeon of about four weeks, dressed weight roughly 12 to 16 oz. It is sold frozen by game suppliers and some Asian markets. Two Cornish hens are the nearest supermarket substitute, though the flavour is milder and paler.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it, and Crisco here is simply vegetable shortening. Butter makes a better sauce for this dish; use 2 tablespoons of either with the 2 tablespoons flour.
- One cup of water is not enoughIt will not cover two jointed squabs. Add enough to come two-thirds up the meat, keep the lid on, and turn the pieces once. Do not add so much that the strained stock ends up thin and flavourless -- you need only the 1 cup the sauce calls for.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons fat to two tablespoons flour to one cup stock is the standard ratio for a medium sauce. Cook the roux a minute before adding liquid, then five minutes of steady whisking as written; less and it tastes of raw flour.
- Season at the endThe recipe salts only the sauce, not the simmering water. Taste after the five minutes rather than before.
- YieldTwo squabs serve two people, or three at a lunch. The dish wants something to catch the sauce, mashed potato, rice or toast.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe books issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced in 1911, and that is why a stewed pigeon calls for shortening where an older English cookbook would have said butter or suet. Squab itself needs no explaining for the period: domestic pigeons were raised in lofts and dovecotes for centuries as a reliable source of tender meat, and American markets sold them as a matter of course into the 1920s before chicken became cheap and year-round. The dish is essentially a small fricassée, the meat simmered in barely enough water and the cooking liquid thickened into its own sauce, a thrifty method that assumes nothing goes to waste.