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Pigeon Pie
Clean and cut each bird in four quarters. Line the sides of a deep baking dish with plain crust and put a layer of salt pork in the bottom. Then put in a layer of birds, seasoned with pepper and salt, dredged with flour and covered with small pieces of butter. Put in other layers to fill the dish; cover with thin slices of pork; pour over all a cup or more of broth or water; cover with crust and bake for about an hour. Leave an opening in the center of the crust and if the pie seems dry, add more water.
A plain double-crust meat pie with no oven temperature and no quantities, written for a cook who already knew what a pigeon pie should look like. The details worth pinning down are the birds, the heat, and how long the meat actually needs.
- The birdsFarmed squab (young pigeon, about 12-16 oz each) is the modern equivalent and is sold frozen by game butchers. The recipe gives no number of birds; roughly four, quartered, will fill a 2-quart dish and serve four. Boneless quail or chicken thighs stand in acceptably, though the flavour is milder.
- Young birds only, or braise firstThis is a straight bake with no preliminary cooking, which works only on young, tender birds. Mature pigeon or woodpigeon breast is dense and sinewy and will still be tough after an hour in a pie; it needs an hour or more of moist braising before it goes anywhere near pastry.
- Oven heatNone is given. Start at 425F for 15 minutes to set and colour the crust, then drop to 350F for the remaining 45 minutes so the filling comes to a simmer without the pastry over-browning.
- Salt porkThinly sliced salt pork or unsmoked streaky bacon does the job; blanch it a minute in boiling water if it is very salty, since the pie is also seasoned and the liquid reduces. Its fat is what keeps lean pigeon from drying out.
- Plain crust"Plain crust" here is a lard or butter shortcrust, not puff. Line only the sides as written, not the base -- an unbaked bottom crust under a wet filling goes to paste.
- The centre openingLeave the vent hole genuinely open, an inch across, and top up through it with hot broth partway through if the level drops. It is both a steam vent and a gauge; a sealed lid will lift or split.
- BrothA cup of liquid in a full dish gives a shallow, well-flavoured gravy rather than a stew. Chicken stock is better than water, and the flour dredged over each layer is the only thickening the pie gets.
- RestingLet the pie stand 10-15 minutes out of the oven so the gravy settles, or it will flood the plate when cut.
Pigeon pie belongs to a long line of English and American dishes built on birds that were once cheap and abundant rather than a delicacy. Dovecotes were a standard feature of farms and estates for centuries, kept precisely because squab could be taken young and tender through much of the year, and colonial and nineteenth-century American cooks also relied on wild pigeons, including the passenger pigeon, which was hunted to extinction in the wild by around 1900, with the last captive bird dying in 1914. Recipes of the kind collected in compilations like Mrs. Fryer's assume a cook with birds to hand and no particular need for measurements. Squab survives as a farmed specialty today, and pigeon pie is still made in Britain and, in a spiced filo form, as Moroccan bastilla.