Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pigeons, Ragout Of
Pigeons, Ragout Of
Pluck, singe, and draw a couple of young pigeons, cleanse and open the gizzards, and stew them with the livers in as much water as will cover them, until they are done enough. Mince all finely, and mix with them their weight in finely-shredded beef suet and grated breadcrumbs. Add a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, a pinch of powdered thyme, and a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Moisten the forcemeat with a well-beaten egg and half an ounce of butter, and with it cover the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, and put these balls inside the birds. Truss the pigeons securely, as if for boiling, and brown them in a little hot butter. Pour over them the liquid in which the gizzards were boiled, and add a sliced onion, a tea-spoonful of brown thickening, a glass of claret, a bunch of savoury herbs, and a little pepper, salt, and powdered mace. Simmer gently for twenty minutes, then strain the gravy, pour it back into the saucepan, put six or eight button mushrooms into it, stew about half an hour longer, and serve. A few forcemeat-balls stewed for eight or ten minutes in the gravy are a great improvement to this ragout. Probable cost, 2s., exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A Victorian braise of stuffed squab in a claret gravy. Everything hinges on the forcemeat: it is bound with the birds' own cooked giblets and wrapped around whole hard-boiled yolks, so it must be firm enough to hold its shape inside the cavity before you truss.
- The birds"Young pigeons" means squab, generally sold today at around 12-16 oz each. Two are stated to serve two or three, which is right for a rich dish with an accompaniment; an older wood pigeon will need considerably longer than the times given and is better breasted out for a different treatment.
- Brown thickeningIn Victorian cookery this generally means flour cooked or browned with butter to a nut-brown colour and kept as a paste for gravies. A teaspoonful of a butter-and-browned-flour paste does the same job; plain white roux will thicken but leaves the sauce pale.
- A glass of claretA wineglass in Victorian cookery books is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, not a modern 6 oz pour. Claret means red Bordeaux, so any dry, moderately tannic red works; about 60 ml and no more, or it will dominate a sauce that only simmers for fifty minutes.
- Beef suetShredded beef suet, fresh or packet, keeps the giblet forcemeat moist. Cold grated butter is a workable substitute at the same weight, though the mixture will be softer and needs chilling before you shape it round the yolks.
- Giblet stockThe gizzards and livers are simmered in barely enough water to cover, and that liquid becomes the braising base. Do not throw it out and reach for stock; the whole seasoning of the dish is built on it. Split and scrape the gizzards clean of grit before cooking.
- Trussing"As if for boiling" means legs pressed close to the body and tied tight rather than extended. With the cavity full of forcemeat, this matters more than usual, since the stuffing will push out at the vent if the birds are loosely tied.
- TimingTwenty minutes in the gravy, then about thirty more once the mushrooms go in, gives roughly fifty minutes of gentle simmering. Squab is fully cooked through at that point, and the stuffing, being meat-based, should reach 74C/165F at the centre of the ball. Keep the pan at a bare tremble; a boil will toughen the breast.
- Mushrooms"Button mushrooms" here means small whole caps, added only for the last stage so they keep their shape. Straining the gravy first, as directed, removes the onion and herb bundle and is worth doing rather than skipping.
- CostThe 2s. is the book's own estimate of probable cost, useful as a period marker only. Squab today is a luxury bird and is the expensive part of the dish, not the wine.
Pigeons were a domestic resource in Britain long before they were a delicacy: manor houses and farms kept dovecotes, and squab was a useful source of tender meat in spring when little else was fat. "Ragout" comes from the French ragoûter, to revive the appetite, and by the nineteenth century it had settled in English cookery to mean a well-seasoned stew with a thickened, wine-touched sauce. The technique here, stuffing a small bird with a giblet forcemeat built around hard-boiled egg yolks, is older than the book and appears in various forms in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English receipts, where whole or halved yolks set into forcemeat were one way of making a modest bird look substantial when carved. Claret, the English term for red Bordeaux, was widely used in cooking in this period; the pricing "exclusive of the wine" shows only that the cost of the wine was left out of the estimate.