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Bread-crumbs (Half a pint of Tomato Sauce)
Half a pound of Sausage Meat. One pint of Stock. One small Onion. One small Carrot. One Turnip. One Egg. Half a pint of Tomato Sauce.
Green Peas to garnish.
Split the pigeons, take out the breast-bone, and braise them with the stock and vegetables for half an hour. Then press them flat. When the birds are cold, spread the sausage meat over the cut side of each. Then egg and crumb and fry in fat. Dish in a circle, tomato sauce round and peas in the centre.
The heading has been mangled in transcription — what survives is the tail of an ingredient list, so the quantities of pigeon, sausage meat, stock, egg and crumbs are all missing. The method itself is complete and workable if you supply the amounts.
- What the title should sayThis is a dish of braised, flattened, crumbed pigeon; "Bread-crumbs" and "Half a pint of Tomato Sauce" are the last two lines of an ingredient list that has been cut off. Half a pint in a British book is 10 fl oz imperial, so a generous cup of sauce.
- The birdsFour squab (young pigeon), about 12 oz each, give four servings as an entrée. Farmed squab is sold frozen by game dealers; poussin of similar weight behaves the same way, though the flavour is milder.
- Braising liquidNo quantity is given for stock or vegetables. Use enough brown chicken or veal stock to come halfway up the split birds, with a chopped onion, carrot and celery stick, covered, at a bare simmer. Thirty minutes suits squab; older pigeon wants an hour or more.
- Pressing flatThis is the hinge of the recipe. Lay the braised birds cut side down between two trays with a weight on top and chill for several hours, ideally overnight. Cold, compressed birds hold the sausage layer and take crumbs cleanly; warm ones fall apart in the pan.
- Sausage meatSpread it thin, no more than about a quarter inch, and use plain unrusked pork sausage meat. It goes on raw and must cook through in the pan — fry until the meat reaches 71C/160F rather than going by the colour of the crumbs.
- FryingShallow-fry in about half an inch of clarified butter or a neutral oil at 170-175C/340-350F, sausage side down first, then turn. Deep-frying works but tends to blow the coating away from the meat.
- The garnishGreen peas in the centre means plainly boiled or buttered peas, not a purée. Reduce the braising stock and add it to the tomato sauce rather than throwing it away.
- ServingOverlapping the birds in a ring with the sauce poured round the base, not over the crumbs, keeps the coating crisp to the table.
Pigeon was the cheap, plentiful meat of the British and French kitchen for centuries — dovecotes were a standard fixture of estates and even substantial farms — and it survived into late-Victorian dinner service as a reliable entrée bird, small enough that one made a single portion. The treatment here is a variant of the old *à la crapaudine* method: the bird is split, boned at the breast and pressed flat, a shape said to resemble a toad, then crumbed and fried for colour and crispness. Adding a layer of sausage meat between bird and crumb is the sort of economical enrichment one associates with professional cookery, though the text itself does not fix its date or its readership.