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Pigeons, Fricasseed, Brown
Take three plump young pigeons; make them ready for boiling, and season with a little pepper, salt, and powdered mace. Put them into a stewpan, with three ounces of clarified butter, and turn them about until they are brightly browned all over. Take them up, drain them well, and put them into a clean saucepan with half a pint of nicely-seasoned stock and a glass of claret. Add a bunch of parsley, a small sprig of thyme, three inches of thin lemon-rind, five or six small onions, a little pepper and salt, and a few grains of cayenne. Cover the saucepan closely, and let the pigeons stew gently for half an hour; take them up, thicken the liquor with brown thickening, and add a few small mushrooms and a table-spoonful of lemon-juice. When the sauce is smooth, heat the birds in it again, dish them, and pour the gravy over them. This recipe may be varied in several ways. A few veal forcemeat balls may be boiled in the gravy, or a dozen oysters may be fried and laid over the birds, and the dish may be garnished with sliced lemon, toasted sippets, or strips of curled bacon. Probable cost, 3s., exclusive of the wine and garnishes. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A brown fricassee in the Victorian sense: the birds are browned in fat, braised in stock and wine, then returned to a thickened sauce. Most of the work is in the sauce, and most of the risk is in the age of the birds.
- Young birds onlyHalf an hour of gentle stewing only works for squab — young pigeons of about four weeks, tender throughout. Older wood pigeon or any bird of unknown age needs an hour and a half or more of slow braising, or it will be leathery no matter how good the sauce is. Farmed squab run 12-16 oz each; three of them serve three or four as the recipe says.
- Brown thickeningThis is the book's term for a browned roux — flour cooked in butter until it is the colour of a hazelnut shell, then whisked into the hot liquor. Such browned thickenings were often made up in advance and kept to hand. Roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour will thicken this quantity of gravy.
- Half a pint of stockAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Use a well-reduced brown poultry or veal stock; the recipe leans on it entirely for body, since there is no long simmer to draw gelatine from the birds.
- A glass of claretClaret is red Bordeaux. A wine glass of the period held roughly 2-4 fl oz; a scant half cup of any dry, unoaked red will do the same job.
- Clarified butterThree ounces is used for browning because clarified butter takes a higher heat without the milk solids scorching. Ghee is the direct substitute. Drain the birds properly after browning or the finished sauce will be greasy.
- MaceThe lacy outer coat of the nutmeg, warmer and less sweet than the nut itself. Ground mace is still sold; a pinch is enough, as it dominates quickly.
- The oyster variationIf you add the fried oysters, cook them only until the edges curl — under a minute a side. Anything longer and they tighten into rubber, which is the usual fate of oysters in nineteenth-century recipes.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter, tucked round the edge of the dish. They exist to soak up the gravy and are worth making.
- CostThe recipe's "probable cost, 3s., exclusive of the wine and garnishes" covers the dish, not the birds alone. Pigeons were cheaper and more plentiful then than now; expect squab to be the expensive part of the dish today.
Pigeons were a staple of English cookery for centuries because a dovecote on an estate or a large farm produced squab through much of the year at little cost to its owner — the birds largely foraged for themselves — and they were killed young, before they had flown and toughened. By the time Cassell's Dictionary appeared in the later nineteenth century, dovecotes were declining but pigeon still filled pages of every general cookbook — roasted, potted, in pies, and stewed like this. The word fricassee had by then loosened from its older French sense of cut-up meat cooked in sauce, and English books distinguished a white fricassee, finished with cream and egg, from a brown one browned in butter first and thickened with roux, as here. The list of optional additions at the end — forcemeat balls, fried oysters, curled bacon, sliced lemon, sippets — is characteristic of the book's method: give one worked recipe, then show how far it stretches.