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PIGEONS (en Matelote)
Put some butter and flour into a stewpan, and simmer until it turns brown. Cook in the butter the pigeons cut in pieces, with a few thin slices of bacon. Pour over them some stock and white wine, and add some chives, parsley, thyme, mushrooms, and onions fried in butter, as well as salt, pepper, and spice. Boil down over a good fire.
A terse continental-style stew written for cooks who already knew the method; almost nothing is quantified. The hinge is the roux: it must go properly brown before the birds go in, because that colour is the only body and depth the dish gets.
- Proportions to work fromFor four pigeons, figure on 2 oz (55 g) butter with 2 oz flour for the roux, about 4 oz (110 g) bacon, and roughly a pint (570 ml) of stock to a half-pint (285 ml) of dry white wine. The original gives none of this and expects judgement.
- Brown, not burnt"Simmer until it turns brown" means a roux cooked over medium heat for 8-12 minutes to the colour of a hazelnut shell, stirring. Black specks mean it is scorched and bitter; start again.
- Which birdSquab, or farmed pigeon of about 12 oz, is tender and needs only 25-35 minutes at a bare simmer. Wild wood pigeon is lean and sinewy and wants an hour or more; taste before you commit to the reduction.
- Cut in piecesSplit each bird down the back and halve it, or take off legs and breasts and add the carcass for flavour. Brown the pieces in the roux only briefly to coat them; deep searing here will darken the flour further.
- The baconUse unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta cut into lardons. Modern heavily smoked, wet-cured supermarket bacon will dominate the wine and the herbs.
- "Spice"Here this most likely means a pinch of ground mace or nutmeg, perhaps with allspice or a clove. A blade of mace and a clove in the pan, fished out at the end, is probably closer to the intention than a spoonful of anything ground.
- Mushrooms and onionsThe text has the onions fried in butter; frying the mushrooms separately too, and adding both in the last 15 minutes, keeps them from collapsing into the sauce, though it departs from the original order. Small button mushrooms and pearl or small pickling onions hold their shape best.
- Boil down over a good fireLift the pigeons out when tender, keep them warm, then reduce the liquid hard until it coats a spoon. Reducing with the birds still in it will overcook them.
- YieldFour pigeons serve four as a main course with bread or plain boiled potatoes, or six as a middle course.
Matelote means "boatman's style", and in French cookery the term almost always belongs to freshwater fish — eel above all — stewed in wine with bacon, onions and mushrooms. Applying it to pigeons is a transfer of the garnish and method rather than the original dish, and it shows how thoroughly the standard French garniture of lardons, button onions and mushrooms had become a portable formula in nineteenth-century English kitchens. The method is essentially a template: brown roux, meat, stock and wine, reduce. Pigeon was cheap and constantly available in Britain then, from dovecotes on estates and from wood pigeon shot as a crop pest, which is why cookbooks of the period carry many more ways to cook it than modern ones, which carry one or two.