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Galantine of Pigeons
Take a couple of pigeons, retaining the heads and feet, but cutting off the ends of the toes. Wrap the heads, after cleaning them, in paper, and be careful not to break the necks. Roast the birds till they are of a nice uniform brown. Take some clear savoury jelly prepared before-hand, warm it, and fill with it a bowl of suitable size. When the pigeons are nearly cold place them in the jelly, tying their heads, bending their feet under them, and placing a sprig of myrtle in their bills, so that they may look as natural as possible. The birds should be placed upside down in the jelly, which should cover their feet. When the jelly is firm--say in about twenty-four hours--turn out upon a dish and serve.
A Victorian display piece rather than a weeknight dish: two roast pigeons suspended upside down in a mould of clear aspic so that they appear to be alive inside the jelly. The cooking is trivial; everything difficult is in the setting.
- The hinge: chill, do not leave standingThe original does not say where the bowl is to stand while the jelly sets over twenty-four hours; a Victorian kitchen would have had a cold larder. Cooked poultry sitting at room temperature that long is a straightforward food-safety failure; the whole assembly belongs in the refrigerator from the moment the birds go into the bowl.
- "Savoury jelly"In Cassell's this means a clarified stock jelly, traditionally set with calf's foot or veal knuckle and cleared with egg white and shell. A strong, well-skimmed chicken or veal stock set with about 1 oz (25-30 g) powdered gelatine per quart gives a jelly firm enough to unmould and slice.
- Temperature of the jelly when you pourWarm it only until it flows -- barely above blood heat. Hot jelly poured over roast birds melts the surface fat and clouds the whole mould. Set a shallow layer first, let it firm, then bed the birds and fill.
- The birdsVictorian pigeon meant a young domestic bird, close to what is now sold as squab, roughly 12-16 oz each. Squab or wood pigeon both work; modern birds come dressed without heads and feet, so the tableau the recipe describes is largely unobtainable and the dish becomes a plain aspic of whole roast pigeon.
- RoastingA hot oven, 425F (220C), for 15-20 minutes browns squab through without drying the breast. The paper wrapping the recipe puts round the head is presumably to keep the head and beak from scorching -- the modern equivalent is foil on any wing tips or leg ends that darken too fast.
- The myrtle sprigPurely decorative, as is the arrangement of feet and heads. It is not eaten and should be removed before serving.
- UnmouldingDip the bowl in hot water for three or four seconds only, run a thin knife around the rim, and invert onto a chilled dish. Longer than that and the outer jelly slumps.
- YieldTwo pigeons in jelly serve four as a cold course, carved at the table with a spoon and fork so the aspic is served alongside the meat.
Galantine properly describes boned, stuffed, poached meat pressed into a roll and glazed with aspic, and the word is generally traced to the Old French galatine, a jellied sauce; by the later nineteenth century English cookery books had stretched it to cover almost anything cold and set in savoury jelly. This entry belongs to the branch of Victorian cookery concerned with the buffet and the supper table, where a dish was expected to be looked at before it was eaten -- hence the heads kept on, the feet tucked under, and the birds inverted so they appear to be swimming in the clear jelly. Pigeon was cheap and plentiful in Britain then, sold young in the markets, which is why Cassell's treats a pair of them as an unremarkable thing to buy. The technique also depended on the calf's-foot stock every large kitchen had going; commercial sheet gelatine and isinglass, which made this kind of work possible in small households, were still displacing it when the book was compiled.