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Pigeons, Served with Water-Cress
Roast a couple of young pigeons in the usual way. Wash and pick two or three bunches of young water-cress, and dry them well. To do this, put them into a dry cloth, take hold of this by the four corners, and shake the leaves until they are dry. Put them on a dish, sprinkle a little salt over them, lay the pigeons upon them, and pour brown gravy over. The cress is sometimes arranged round the dish instead of being placed under the birds. Time, about twenty minutes to roast the pigeons. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for two persons.
A plating idea more than a recipe: two roast birds on a bed of dressed cress, with pan gravy poured over. Everything depends on the birds being small, young and briefly cooked, and on the cress being bone dry.
- What bird to buy"Young pigeons" here means squab — a young, unflown bird of roughly 12-16 oz, sold by good butchers and game dealers. Mature wood pigeon is a different proposition entirely: lean, tough and better braised or breasted off, and twenty minutes will not make it tender.
- "Roast in the usual way"The book gives no temperature. A hot oven, around 425-450F, suits a small bird. Season inside and out, truss, and bard the breasts with a thin sheet of fat bacon or brush generously with butter, since squab has almost no fat of its own.
- Twenty minutes, and donenessTwenty minutes at that heat gives a squab breast that is still rosy, which is how the bird is traditionally eaten and what the recipe assumes. Cooked to the 165F that current food-safety guidance sets for poultry, the breast will be grey and dry; if you want the pink bird, buy from a supplier you trust and accept that it is not cooked through by modern standards.
- Rest before platingGive the birds five to ten minutes off the heat, breast down, before they go on the cress. The recipe is silent on this, but juices running out onto the salad will collapse the leaves.
- Drying the cressThe cloth-shaking method works, and a salad spinner works better. Dry leaves matter because wet cress dilutes the gravy and goes limp under the hot birds; this is the hinge of the dish.
- Salt at the last momentSprinkle the salt as the birds go down, not before. Salted cress left standing weeps and wilts within a few minutes.
- Brown gravyIn Victorian usage this generally means a meat gravy: the roasting-pan juices deglazed and let down with brown stock, or a spoonful of espagnole. A pale flour-and-water gravy will taste of nothing against the peppery cress.
- Cress supplyTwo or three bunches is generous by modern shop standards; two supermarket bags will do. Buy cultivated watercress rather than gathering wild, which can carry liver fluke from grazing land.
- Yield and costTwo birds, two people, as stated; one pigeon per person is the standard portion. The "2s." is Victorian shillings and gives a sense of the dish's standing rather than any usable modern figure.
Pigeon was ordinary meat in Britain for centuries: manor houses and farms kept dovecotes, and the squabs taken from them were a reliable supply of fresh meat in seasons when little else was young and tender. By the Victorian period the dovecote was in decline and pigeon had become a butcher's item, but the pairing with watercress had settled into convention -- the same convention that puts a bunch of cress beside a roast game bird or a grilled chop. Watercress was cheap, sold in bunches by street hawkers in London, and grown commercially in the chalk streams of Hampshire and Dorset, which the railways connected to the city markets. The logic of the plate is sound whatever its origin: a sharp, mustardy leaf against rich dark meat and a strong brown gravy, with the leaves under the birds so they take up the juices. Cassell's notes the alternative arrangement around the edge, which keeps the cress crisp at the cost of that exchange.