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Potted Pigeons
Re- Clean, stuff and truss six pigeons, place upright in a stewpan, and add one quart boiling water in which celery has been cooked. Cover, and cook slowly three hours or until tender; or cook in oven in a covered earthern dish. Reearthern dish. move from water, cool slightly , sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with barley flour, and brown entire surface in pork fat. Make a sauce with one-fourth cup, each, butter substitute and barley flour cooked together and stock remaining in pan; there should be two cups. Place each bird on a slice of dry toast, and pour gravy over all. Garnish with parsley.
A wartime-era braise for whole birds, written when wheat flour and butter were being conserved. The method is sound; most of what needs translating is the shopping list.
- The birdsCommercial squab (young domestic pigeon) runs about 12-16 oz each and is sold frozen by game butchers and some Asian markets. Six will serve six as a main course. Wood pigeon breasts are not a substitute here, since the recipe depends on whole trussed birds standing upright.
- Three hours is for old birdsThat timing assumes mature pigeons with worked muscle. Farmed squab is tender in 45-60 minutes of gentle simmering and will fall off the bone and dry out if held for three. Cook to tender, not to the clock.
- "Potted" hereIt means cooked slowly in a covered pot, not the sealed, butter-capped potted meat sold under the same word. Nothing is being preserved; the dish is eaten hot.
- Oven versionThe covered earthenware dish is a lidded casserole or Dutch oven. The recipe gives no oven temperature; a slow oven, around 300-325F, matches the long gentle cooking called for.
- Barley flour and butter substituteBoth are wheat- and dairy-conservation swaps. Barley flour browns fast and thickens a little less firmly than wheat; margarine was one common butter substitute of the period. Plain flour and butter work in the same proportions if you are not keeping to the original.
- The celery waterThe quart of water in which celery has been cooked carries most of the flavour of the braise, so do not replace it with plain water. Simmer a head of celery trimmings for 20 minutes, or use a light unsalted stock with celery added.
- The sauceA quarter cup each of fat and flour to two cups of liquid is the standard proportion for a medium gravy, on the thick side of a pouring sauce. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding the strained pan stock, and reduce or add stock to reach the consistency you want.
- BrowningDry the birds well after the braise before dredging, or the flour will slide off in the pork fat. Brown in a wide pan over fairly high heat and turn them; browning the whole surface of a small round bird takes attention.
- Garbled textThe stray "Re-" at the opening and the repeated "earthern dish" are artifacts of the transcription: the word "Remove" has been broken across a line and a fragment duplicated. They are not instructions.
Barley flour and "butter substitute" point toward the food-conservation cookery associated with the First World War, when American home cooks were urged to save wheat, butter and sugar for shipment abroad, and publishers rushed out books full of barley, rye, oat and corn substitutions — though the same substitutions recur in later conservation cookery, so the page cannot be dated on that basis alone. Pigeons fit the same logic: squab could be raised in a backyard loft, and was one of the few meats a household could produce itself. The technique, though, is much older than the war — braising small birds in a covered pot with a flavored liquid, then browning and serving them on toast to soak up the gravy, is standard nineteenth-century English and American practice, and the toast sop is often said to descend from the medieval trencher, though this is a repeated tradition rather than a documented line of descent.