Pigeons, Roast
INGREDIENTS.- 2 pigeons, 3 oz. of butter, pepper and salt to taste.
PIGEONS, TRUSSING OF. requires so much washing. Wipe the birds very dry, season them inside with pepper and salt, and put about oz. of butter into the body of each; this makes them moist.
ROAST PIGEON.
Place them at a bright fire, and baste them well the whole of the time they are cooking (they will be done enough in from 20 to 30 minutes); garnish with fried parsley, and serve with a tureen of parsley and butter. Bread sauce and gravy, the same as for roast fowl, are exceedingly nice accompaniments to roast pigeons, as also egg-sauce.
TIME. From 20 minutes to hour.
SEASONABLE from April to September; but in the greatest perfection from Midsummer to Michaelmas.
The text has come through with some gaps and repetitions from the original printing, and the roasting is described for an open fire rather than an oven. The essentials survive intact: butter inside, constant basting, a short cooking time.
- What bird to buyBeeton's pigeons are young domestic birds, sold today as squab, usually around 12-16 oz each and available from game dealers and some butchers. Wild wood pigeon is a different proposition: leaner, tougher, and better braised or served as breast fillets than roasted whole.
- Oven instead of open fireA "bright fire" means fierce radiant heat from an open hearth. The book gives no oven setting; a hot oven of around 425-450F is the usual modern substitute, with the birds on a rack over a tray so the butter can be spooned back over them.
- Basting is the hingeSquab carries little fat cover and the breast dries quickly. Basting for the whole of the cooking time, as the recipe directs, is the instruction that decides whether the dish works.
- Timing and donenessTwenty to thirty minutes is right for whole squab at high heat; the printed "TIME. From 20 minutes to hour" is a lost fraction, almost certainly half an hour. Modern practice roasts squab breast to about 135-140F and rests it, which gives rosy meat; a fully set, opaque breast will already be dry.
- Parsley and butterThe "tureen of parsley and butter" is melted butter thickened slightly and stirred with chopped parsley, a standard Victorian sauce served hot in a boat. Fried parsley for the garnish means whole sprigs dropped briefly into hot fat until they stop hissing, then drained.
- YieldOne bird per person for a main course; the recipe as written serves two.
- SeasonMidsummer to Michaelmas (29 September) is the old squab season, when the year's young birds were leaving the dovecote. Farmed squab is now available year round.
Pigeon was for centuries one of the cheapest sources of fresh meat in Britain, because a dovecote produced it without pasture, grain rations or slaughter costs: the squabs were taken from the nest at four weeks, before they had flown and while the flesh was still tender. That is the bird Mrs Beeton assumes here, and it explains the tight seasonal window she gives, from April to September and best from Midsummer to Michaelmas, which tracks the domestic breeding cycle rather than any shooting season. The battery of accompaniments she offers, parsley and butter, bread sauce, gravy, egg sauce, is the standard Victorian treatment for small roast birds, all of them there to compensate for how little fat a pigeon carries. By the time Household Management appeared in 1861 the great estate dovecotes were already in decline, and pigeon was on its way from everyday food to the game-dealer's specialty it is now.