Adele Ritchie
Cook ten minutes before stuffing squabs. Place squabs in casserole, bake in hot oven twenty minutes to half hour. Add one cup of white stock or chicken broth five minutes before serving. Clean and dress 4 jumbo squabs. 1 pint oysters (finely chopped). 1/2 loaf bread. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/2 teaspoon pepper. 1/2 teaspoon paprika. 1 small onion (chopped).
Serve with potato puff balls.
Your your John Luly
The text as printed is a fragment: the stuffing itself never made it to the page, and the recipe opens mid-thought with an instruction to cook something ten minutes before it goes into the birds. What survives is a workable method for roasting squab, provided you supply your own forcemeat.
- The missing stuffing"Cook ten minutes before stuffing squabs" refers to a mixture that never reached the page, whether dropped by the printer or never supplied by the contributor. Contemporary cookbooks offer squab stuffings along the lines of chopped mushrooms, giblets and shallot sweated in butter with breadcrumbs, or a mushroom-and-rice mixture, cooked briefly first so it goes in warm.
- SquabA young domestic pigeon, slaughtered before it flies, weighing 12 to 16 oz dressed. Still sold by game butchers and some Asian markets, usually frozen. One bird per person is the standard portion.
- CasseroleIn 1916 kitchen language this is the vessel, not the dish: a lidded earthenware or enamelled pot that goes from stovetop to oven. A Dutch oven or any covered braiser is the equivalent.
- Hot ovenRoughly 425-450F. Twenty to thirty minutes at that heat suits a bird of this size. Modern restaurant practice often serves squab pink, but note that this leaves the bird below the 165F recommended for poultry; cooked through to 165F it dries out badly.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or poultry stock, pale rather than browned. Chicken broth, as the recipe allows, is the practical substitute. Added five minutes before serving it deglazes the pot and makes a thin pan sauce rather than a braising liquid.
- Potato puff ballsProbably pommes dauphine: pate a choux folded into dry mashed potato and deep-fried into light spheres, though the name could cover other fried potato garnishes of the period.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of birds; serves as many as you have, one per person.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries (1916) collected contributions from stage performers, and the pages tell you as much about theatrical households as about cooking — several entries are clearly dictated to, or written out by, someone else, and this one closes with the name John Luly, most likely the cook who actually made it. Adele Ritchie was a musical comedy soprano who worked steadily in Broadway and touring productions from the 1890s into the 1910s. Squab was expensive, small, and quickly roasted, and it was as much a fixture of restaurant and supper-club menus as of the domestic cookbooks of the period, this one included. The garbled state of the text — a stuffing invoked but never given, a stray "Your your" before the signature — is typical of celebrity charity cookbooks of the period, assembled fast from correspondence and set into type with little checking.