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Egg and Bread-crumbs (Half a pint of Brown Sauce)
Three Pigeons. Quarter of a pound of Quenelle Meat. Half a pint of Brown Sauce.
Macédoine of Vegetables to garnish.
Split the pigeons in halves, remove the breastbone and beat them flat. Sauté them with two ounces of butter, pepper, and salt. Then press thein flat. When the pigeons are cold, spread the quenelle meat over the cut side of the birds.
Then egg, crumb, and fry in fat. Dish in a circle, brown sauce round and macédoine in centre.
This is one page of a chain of recipes: the heading carries the sauce quantity, and the birds, the quenelle meat and the macédoine are all assumed from entries nearby. Read it as a method rather than a self-contained recipe, and gather the components first.
- What is missingNo number of pigeons and no quenelle-meat quantity are given. For four people, reckon on four pigeons (squab, about 12 oz each) split into eight halves, and roughly 12 oz of forcemeat to coat the cut sides.
- Quenelle meatA raw pounded forcemeat, usually veal, chicken or game worked with panada, egg white and cream. A modern equivalent is a smooth mousseline farce made in a processor and chilled firm before spreading; it must be cold and stiff or it will slide off in the fat.
- The hingeThe forcemeat goes on raw and is only cooked by the frying. Keep it to about a quarter-inch layer and fry at 340-350F for 6-8 minutes so the centre sets through; hotter fat browns the crumbs long before the farce is done.
- Brown sauceHalf an imperial pint is 10 fl oz, a little over a cup and a quarter in US measure. The book means a brown sauce of the espagnole type, built on brown stock and conventionally thickened with a brown roux, rather than a quick pan gravy; a well-reduced veal stock stands in well.
- MacédoineA dice of mixed vegetables, classically carrot, turnip, French beans and peas, each cooked separately to keep its colour, then bound in butter. Cut everything to a uniform quarter-inch.
- Sauté then coolThe initial sauté in 2 oz butter is a partial cooking, perhaps 4-5 minutes a side, meant to firm the birds and let them be pressed flat. Chill them properly before spreading the farce, ideally on a tray under a weighted board.
- Egg and crumbBeaten egg with a spoon of oil, then fine dry white crumbs. A second coat on the forcemeat side is worth the trouble, and 20 minutes in the refrigerator sets the crust so it holds in the fryer.
- ServingDish in a ring on a hot plate, sauce poured around rather than over, vegetables heaped in the middle. Eight halves serve four as an entrée in the old sense: a made dish between fish and roast.
Splitting a small bird, flattening it and coating it in egg and crumbs is close to the old crapaudine treatment, though the crapaudine cut proper spreads the bird open in one piece rather than halving it; the name is often said to come from the resemblance of the flattened bird to a toad. Adding a layer of quenelle forcemeat to the cut side is a further refinement, giving the kitchen a dish that could be prepared cold in the morning and fried to order at night. Pigeon was then a cheap and constant item in British kitchens, which is perhaps why a book of this kind can print the method without troubling to say how many birds to buy. The macédoine in the centre, a dice of several vegetables cooked apart and reassembled, is generally traced to eighteenth-century French practice and named for the mixed peoples of Macedonia; it survived into hotel cookery precisely because it looked deliberate on a silver dish. The layout here, with the sauce quantity standing as the title, shows how such volumes worked: they were aides-memoire for cooks already trained in the system, not instruction for beginners.