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Pigeons, Compote Of
Truss half a dozen plump young pigeons as if for boiling. Lard them down the breasts, or, if preferred, cover their breasts with thin slices of fat bacon. Fry them in hot butter till they are equally and lightly browned all over; then drain them, and put them side by side into a stewpan large enough to contain them. Barely cover them with good gravy, and add half a dozen small onions, a dozen button-mushrooms, a glassful of claret, and a little salt and cayenne. Let the birds stew gently for half an hour; then add a large table-spoonful of tomato sauce, and stew a few minutes longer. Place the birds on a hot dish, with the sauce, etc., round them. If liked, the pigeons may be stuffed with veal forcemeat, and a dozen forcemeat balls may be sent to table with them. Time, altogether, about two hours. Probable cost, 6s. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A Victorian brown stew of young pigeons, closer to a French compote de pigeons than to anything fruit-based. Most of the work is in the browning and the stock; the stew itself is short.
- The birds"Plump young pigeons" means squab — farmed birds of about four weeks, 12-16 oz each, sold frozen by game butchers and some online suppliers. Older wood pigeon will not be tender in thirty minutes and needs an hour or more, or use just the breasts and shorten the cooking sharply.
- Larding, or notThreading strips of pork fat through the breast with a larding needle is the original method; the bacon-slice alternative given here does the same job with no special equipment. Squab breast is very lean and dries out fast, so do one or the other rather than neither.
- "Good gravy""Good gravy" here is best read in the usual Victorian sense of a rich brown stock rather than a thickened pan sauce. Use a strong veal or chicken stock, reduced; the finished liquid thickens only by reduction unless you add a little beurre manie at the end.
- A glassful of claretA glassful is imprecise. The conventional Victorian wineglassful was about 2 fl oz / 60 ml, though "a glassful" of claret may well mean more; use somewhere in that range. Claret is red Bordeaux; any dry, moderately tannic red works.
- The stated time"Time, altogether, about two hours" covers trussing, larding, frying and making the forcemeat as well as the stewing. The birds themselves cook for about thirty-five minutes. Do not extend the stew to two hours or the breasts will shred.
- DonenessIf you want to follow modern food-safety guidance for poultry, take it to 165F / 74C at the thigh. Stewed this way it will be well past that; check at thirty minutes, since small birds go from tender to stringy quickly.
- Tomato sauceNot ketchup. A reduced, sieved tomato sauce or a spoonful of good passata plus a pinch of sugar gives the intended sharpening at the finish.
- ForcemeatVeal forcemeat here is minced veal with suet or fat bacon, breadcrumbs, egg, lemon zest, mace and herbs. Ready-made veal mince plus a third its weight in fatty pork works; the balls are poached or fried separately and added at the table.
- Yield and costSix or seven servings as written, though one squab per person is a fair modern portion. The 6s. is the late-Victorian probable cost of the whole dish, wine and forcemeat included, not a price for the birds alone.
Pigeons were a standing feature of the English larder for centuries: a manorial dovecote produced squabs through much of the year. "Compote" here is the French culinary sense -- a slow stew in which the ingredients hold their shape in a concentrated sauce -- rather than the fruit dessert the word now suggests in English, and the treatment (larding, small onions, button mushrooms, red wine, a late spoonful of tomato) belongs to the Anglo-French repertoire Cassell's drew on. The addition of tomato sauce is a small marker of date: tomatoes moved from suspicion to routine seasoning in British kitchens over the course of the nineteenth century, and by the later part of it a bottled or made-up tomato sauce was a familiar storecupboard item. The dish faded with the dovecote and with the shift to poultry farming; squab now reads as a restaurant luxury rather than the everyday dish it was here.