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Pigeon, Puree Of
Cut three pigeons into small joints, and put them into a pan with three pints of stock, two onions, a carrot, a turnip, a head of celery, four ounces of ham, and pepper and salt to taste, and simmer for two hours. Take the meat off the breasts, and put it on one side. Let the bones, etc., stew for another hour, then strain; cut the meat from the breasts into very small shreds, and return these to the stock, which may be slightly thickened and coloured. Add a table-spoonful of cream and a squeeze of lemon-juice, and serve.
A clear pigeon soup dressed up with shredded breast meat, despite the name — nothing here is actually pushed through a sieve. The whole thing hangs on getting three hours of gentle extraction out of the carcasses without boiling the stock cloudy.
- What to buySquab (young farmed pigeon) is the practical modern substitute, sold frozen at game dealers and some butchers; dressed birds usually run 12–16 oz each. Wood pigeon works and is stronger in flavour, but the breasts are small and lean, so shred them fine as directed.
- Three pintsImperial pints, so 60 fl oz — about 7¼ US cups, or roughly 1.7 litres. Three hours of simmering will reduce it appreciably, though the recipe does not say by how much.
- Simmer, do not boilA bare tremble at the surface for the whole three hours. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat from the birds and the ham into the liquid and you lose the clarity this soup depends on.
- Take the breasts out on timeTwo hours will overcook breast meat badly. If that matters to you, lift the breast joints at 30–40 minutes, strip the meat and return the bones to the pot for the remaining time — a departure from the recipe as written, which takes the breasts off only after the full two hours.
- The ham and the saltFour ounces of ham does much of the seasoning work. The recipe seasons at the outset, but salting at the end, once the stock has reduced and concentrated, guards against an over-salty finish.
- Thickened and colouredPeriod shorthand for a spoonful of blond roux or arrowroot slaked in cold stock, plus a few drops of gravy browning or caramel to deepen the colour. Arrowroot is the cleaner choice: whisk 2 tsp into cold liquid, stir in, and bring just to the boil once.
- Cream and lemon lastAdd both off the heat. A tablespoon of cream in this volume is a finishing gloss rather than a body-builder, and lemon juice added to simmering thickened stock can curdle the cream and dull the flavour.
- YieldFour generous first-course servings, or six small cups. Serve with fried croutons if you want the shredded meat to have something to sit against.
Cassell's uses purée loosely: the word is generally traced to French professional cookery, where it meant a soup thickened by its own sieved solids, but in English domestic books it seems to have drifted to cover almost any smooth, thickened, strained soup — hence a "purée of pigeon" in which the pigeon arrives in shreds. Pigeon is often said to have been cheap protein in nineteenth-century Britain, kept in dovecotes on estates and farms and sold in city markets, which may be why period cookbooks treat three birds as an unremarkable basis for a soup rather than a luxury. The construction here is thoroughly of its time: a long extraction from bones and root vegetables, a scrap of ham for depth and salt, a roux or arrowroot for body, and a spoonful of cream and a squeeze of lemon at the very end to lift the whole thing.