Pigeon Pie
Take six young pigeons. After they are drawn, trussed, and singed, stuff them with the chopped livers mixed with parsley, salt, pepper, and a small piece of butter. Cover the bottom of the dish with rather small pieces of beef. On the beef, place a thin layer of chopped parsley and mushrooms, seasoned with pepper and salt. Over this place the pigeons, between each putting the yolk of a hard-boiled egg. Add some brown sauce or gravy. Cover with puff paste and bake the pie for an hour and a half.--Mrs. C. C.
A raised-crust meat pie of the old English type, scaled for a large table. The main work is sourcing the birds and controlling the oven so the paste browns while the meat below cooks through.
- The birds"Young pigeons" means squab — a domestic pigeon killed before it flies, around 12-16 oz whole. Butchers and game suppliers sell them cleaned; six will not fit a standard pie dish, so plan on a large oval roaster or halve the recipe.
- Drawn, trussed, singedDrawn is gutted, trussed is legs and wings tied close to the body, singed is passing the plucked skin over a flame to burn off pin feathers. Birds bought oven-ready need only the trussing.
- The liversSquab livers are tiny; six give perhaps two tablespoons of stuffing. Chop them raw with the parsley and butter and they will cook inside the birds. If your birds arrive without giblets, chicken livers substitute directly.
- "Rather small pieces of beef"This is a layer of stewing beef — chuck or shin, cut in pieces of about an inch — forming the bed of the pie and enriching the gravy. Reckon 1 to 1 1/2 lb for six birds.
- OvenBake at 350F for the bulk of the time; if the paste is colouring too fast in the first half hour, cover it loosely with foil and remove for the last fifteen minutes. Ninety minutes should be about right for whole birds over raw beef.
- Puff pasteNineteenth-century puff paste is broadly comparable to the laminated dough sold frozen as all-butter puff pastry. Cut a vent or two, or the steam from six birds will lift the lid off.
- Brown sauce or gravyA dark stock-based sauce, thickened with browned flour. Add about a cup — enough to moisten the beef, not to submerge the birds, since the pie has no bottom crust to hold liquid.
- ServingSix squab serve six as a main course, one bird apiece, with the beef and gravy spooned alongside. Let the pie stand ten minutes before cutting so the gravy settles.
Pigeon pie came to Virginia straight out of the English kitchen, where dovecotes were a fixture of the manor farm and squab was the cheap meat of early spring, before lambs and chickens were ready. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathers recipes contributed by named Virginia housekeepers — hence the "Mrs. C. C." signature — and this one preserves the older layered construction, beef below to make the gravy and hard-boiled egg yolks tucked between the birds, a habit generally traced to medieval and Tudor pies where eggs and dried fruit filled the gaps. American cooks of the period would also have had wild pigeon; the passenger pigeon was still being netted and shipped by the barrel in the 1870s and was extinct in the wild within forty years.