Home › Who Hollared Fowl! › Creole Squabs
Creole Squabs
3/4 CUP MELTED FAT 6 SLICES CANNED PINEAPPLE 2 CUPS PINEAPPLE JUICE Split squabs down the back; dust lightly with salt and pepper. Dredge with flour and brown golden in hot fat. Cover birds with greased paper and roast in slow oven 11/2 hours. Baste at intervals with pineapple juice until 1 cupful has been used. When nearly done add rest of the pineapple juice and cook 15 minutes. Serve with pineapple slices, tossed in butter.
This recipe does for any young, plump birds.
A camp-style roast built around canned pineapple, from an era when squab was a common market bird. The method is sound, but the timing belongs to a different idea of how pigeon should eat.
- Slow ovenRead this as 300F. The birds go into hot fat first for colour, so the oven is only finishing them, not browning them.
- The timing is the hingeAn hour and a half at 300F takes squab well past done and into dry, livery territory. Squab is dark-fleshed and is now roasted hot and fast, with the breast pulled at 130-135F and rested; a 1 lb bird needs roughly 20-25 minutes, not 90.
- Squab, and what to buySquab is a young pigeon, about 3/4 to 1 lb dressed, sold frozen at good butchers and by mail order. Poussin or Cornish hen substitutes well for the same treatment, though both are white-fleshed and should be cooked to 165F.
- Greased paperParchment cut to fit and brushed with fat. It does the work of barding: keeps the breast from drying while the legs catch up. Foil will steam the skin you just browned.
- Three-quarter cup of melted fatThat is browning fat for a skillet, not an ingredient absorbed into the dish. Lard, bacon fat or clarified butter all suit; pour off the excess before the birds go in the oven.
- Canned juice, not freshThe canning heat deactivates bromelain. Fresh pineapple juice used as a long baste can break down the surface of the meat, so it is safer to stay with canned or a pasteurised carton juice.
- Pineapple slices in butterGet the pan properly hot and let the slices take real colour on both sides. Pale warm pineapple adds nothing; caramelised edges give the acid something to sit against.
- YieldSix slices of pineapple points to six birds, one per person as a main course or two per person if the birds are small and the meal is otherwise light.
Squab was ordinary American market poultry well into the mid-twentieth century, raised in commercial lofts and sold young because a pigeon that has begun to fly turns tough. Pairing it with canned pineapple suggests the interwar and postwar decades, when tinned Hawaiian fruit was cheap and widely used; the same juice-baste treatment shows up on ham, chicken and pork loin in books of the period. The Creole label here may signal little more than sweet-and-savoury fruit glazing rather than a close connection to Louisiana cooking proper.