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Six Mushrooms (Eight small Quenelles shaped)
Eight small Quenelles shaped in teaspoons.
Eight or ten croûtons of fried Bread.
Truss the pigeons for boiling and braise them for about forty-five minutes. Then cut them into about four pieces; arrange neatly on a dish; pour the sauce over and round. Place the pieces of carrot and turnip, the olives, mushrooms, and quenelles here and there as garnish, and stand the croûtons round the base of the entrée. The pieces of carrot and turnip must be boiled separately.
This is the finishing half of a garnished braised pigeon entrée — the ingredient list and sauce belong to the page before it, so treat what follows as assembly notes rather than a standalone recipe.
- What is missingThe fragment opens mid-list, with only the quenelles, croûtons and (in the heading) mushrooms surviving; the rest of the ingredients were presumably listed under the preceding recipe. To use this text you would need braised pigeon, the braising sauce, forcemeat for the quenelles, carrot and turnip, olives and mushrooms — the quantities of all but the quenelles and croûtons are lost.
- PigeonsBooks of this kind generally meant young domestic or dovecote pigeons. Squab of roughly 12-16 oz is the nearest modern equivalent; wild wood pigeon breast is much leaner and will not stand 45 minutes of braising.
- Braising time and heatThe recipe gives forty-five minutes and no more. That suits a tightly covered pan barely simmering in stock; if you work in a modern oven, a low setting (around 325F) is the usual equivalent. At that length the breast will be cooked well past pink.
- Quenelles shaped in teaspoonsTwo wetted teaspoons are used to mould the forcemeat into small ovals, which are then poached in barely trembling salted water or stock — never a rolling boil, or they break up. Reckon 5-6 minutes for teaspoon-sized ones.
- Carrot and turnipThe recipe specifies only "pieces", cut to your own taste, and insists they be boiled separately from the braise. Cook them just to tender.
- OlivesThe text does not say which sort; green stoned olives would be the usual reading. Modern olives vary widely in saltiness, so taste before adding them to a finished sauce.
- CroûtonsNot diced bread: these are shaped pieces of fried bread, stood round the base of the dish, so cut them large enough to stand. Fry them at the last moment; they go leathery if held.
- YieldEight quenelles and eight to ten croûtons suggest a dish for about four, though the number of pigeons was given on the missing page.
Braised pigeon under a brown sauce with turned root vegetables, olives, mushrooms and quenelles is a set piece of late nineteenth-century professional cookery, the sort of entrée that came between fish and roast in a long service menu. The garnish is doing most of the work: turned carrot and turnip, poached forcemeat and cut croûtons are all evidence of a brigade with time and hands, and the instruction that the vegetables be boiled separately is exactly the kind of discipline these books were written to instil. Pigeon was kept in dovecotes and sold young as squab, which is why it appears so freely in books of this period and so rarely now. The book's fragmentary heading — an ingredient line stranded above the method — may be no more than a page or column break.