Home › The Principles of Cookery › PIGEONS, BROILED (another way)
PIGEONS, BROILED (another way)
Mix an ounce of butter with a dessert-spoonful of dried flour. Add a finely-minced shallot, a salt-spoonful of chopped parsley, and a little pepper and salt. Stir the mixture over the fire for five minutes. Truss two pigeons as if for boiling, flatten them without breaking the skin, put a piece of butter and a little pepper and salt inside them, and tie them at both ends. Dip them into the mixture while it is warm, and continue to do so until they are covered with it. Leave them in a cool place for an hour or more, then broil them over a slow fire. Send tomato, mushroom, or piquant sauce to table with them. If preferred, pigeons may be split open and half cooked in butter before they are egged, breaded, and broiled. Time to broil, fifteen minutes each side. Probable cost, 9d. to 1s. 9d. each. Sufficient for two persons.
A butter-and-flour paste stands in for a marinade here, sealing the birds and browning into a crust over the fire. The technique transfers directly to a charcoal grill or a heavy ridged pan.
- The hinge: keep the paste warmThe butter-flour mixture only coats evenly while it is still soft and just off the heat. Let it set hard and it will slide off in sheets on the grill; work it onto the birds warm, then chill them for an hour so the coating firms in place.
- Archaic measuresA dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons. A salt-spoonful is roughly a quarter teaspoon. An ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons.
- "Dried flour"Usually taken to mean flour warmed and dried out before use, a precaution when flour was kept in damp larders; it can also simply mean dry flour as opposed to a wet paste. Ordinary all-purpose flour needs no such treatment, and the five minutes of stirring over heat cooks out the raw taste in any case.
- Trussed as for boiling, then flattenedThe bird is kept whole rather than cut open: legs and wings drawn tight against the body, then the whole bird pressed flat under a weight or the flat of a heavy pan. The string at both ends holds the butter stuffing in. Use kitchen twine.
- Sourcing the birdsSquab from a butcher or game dealer runs 12-16 oz and is the closest match. Wild woodpigeon is smaller, much leaner, and far tougher in the leg; whole-bird broiling suits farmed squab better.
- Time and heatFifteen minutes a side over a slow fire suits a mature bird and will dry out a squab. Over medium coals, farmed squab needs considerably less, roughly 6-8 minutes a side; check the thickest part of the thigh rather than relying on the clock.
- The variation at the endSplit, part-cooked in butter, then egged, crumbed and broiled: useful if the birds are on the tough side, since the gentle butter stage cooks them through and the broiling only needs to colour the crumbs. Watch it closely, as breadcrumbs scorch over open flame.
- Yield and sauceTwo birds serve two, as stated, with a starch alongside. Of the three sauces suggested, a sharp tomato or a mushroom sauce enriched with the pan butter both work; a piquant sauce of this period is generally a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar and shallot, often with gherkin or capers.
Pigeon was cheap and widely available meat in Victorian Britain, kept in dovecotes on estates and farms and sold in city markets, which is part of why a price as low as ninepence a bird could be quoted. The wide price spread here, ninepence to one shilling ninepence, may reflect differences in size, season and source between a common pigeon and a plump dovecote squab. Coating a small bird in a savoury butter paste before grilling belongs to the same family of techniques as a la diable and the egged-and-breadcrumbed "devilled" birds found in books of this period: the paste bastes and browns at once, protecting lean flesh from a fire that could not be turned down with a dial. The dish faded from English home cooking as pigeon shifted from everyday protein to game-dealer specialty over the twentieth century.