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PIGEONS (a la Veronese)
Cut up three or four pigeons into quarters, and stew for fifteen minutes in a good stock. Remove them from the pan, dry well, brush with egg, and cover each piece well with a mixture of four ounces of bread-crumbs, two ounces of grated Parmesan cheese, and one table-spoonful of chopped parsley. Fry to a nice brown, and garnish with fried parsley.
A two-stage recipe: poach, then crumb and fry. The instruction that matters most is the drying — crumbs will not adhere to wet, hot poultry, and the coating slides off in the fat.
- The birds"Pigeons" here almost certainly means young, tender birds rather than old or wild ones, since fifteen minutes' stewing assumes tenderness; modern squab, sold at roughly 12-16 oz each, is the nearest equivalent. Four birds quartered gives 16 pieces, enough for four people as a main course. Older or wild birds need an hour or more of braising and will be leathery after fifteen minutes.
- Dry, then eggAfter the stock bath let the quarters cool on a rack until they stop steaming and the surface feels dry to the touch — ten to fifteen minutes. Blotting a hot wet piece with a towel is not enough; the residual moisture will keep coming to the surface.
- Coating quantitiesFour ounces of breadcrumbs is about two cups of fresh crumbs or a scant cup of dried; two ounces of Parmesan is roughly two-thirds of a cup grated. That is generous for four birds, which is deliberate — you want a deep bed to press each piece into.
- Cheese and browningParmesan in a crumb coating browns considerably faster than plain crumbs and turns bitter if pushed. Fry at 340-350F rather than the usual 375F, and expect colour in three to four minutes a side.
- "Fry to a nice brown"The book gives no depth of fat; shallow frying in an inch or so is the likeliest reading for crumbed pieces. Turn once, carefully, with tongs. The meat is already cooked through, so you are only setting the crust.
- Fried parsleyWell-dried parsley sprigs dropped into the same fat for 20-30 seconds, until they stop spitting and turn brilliant green. Wet parsley will make the fat erupt, so dry it thoroughly first.
- The stock is worth keepingThe poaching liquid gains a good deal from the pigeon bones. Strain and reduce it for a sauce, or hold it back for soup — the recipe as written simply abandons it.
Cassell's uses "a la Veronese" loosely, as Victorian kitchens are often said to have done with Italian place-names: it seems to signal the Parmesan and parsley crumb rather than any particular dish from Verona. The method itself is standard nineteenth-century practice for small birds — cook them gently in stock to guarantee tenderness, then crumb and fry for colour and crunch, a technique applied equally to sweetbreads, lambs' feet and cold cooked fowl. Pigeon was thoroughly ordinary food in Britain at the time, supplied by dovecotes and by a brisk London trade, and appears throughout the dictionary in pies, stews and compotes; it slipped out of general use in the twentieth century and returned only as restaurant squab.