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Stuffing for Potted Pigeons
1 Cup Hot Riced Potatoes 1/4 Teaspoon Salt 1/8 Teaspoon Pepper 1/4 Teaspoon Marjoram or Summer Savory Few Drops Onion Juice 1 Tablespoon Butter Substitute 1/4 Cup Soft Stale Bread Crumbs Soaked in some of the Celery Water and Wrung in Cheese-cloth Yolk of 1 Egg Mix ingredients in order given.
A potato-based forcemeat meant to fill four to six small birds, not a tray of bread stuffing. It is written as a component recipe, so it assumes you already have a pot of birds and celery going.
- Celery waterThe recipe assumes celery is being cooked somewhere in the same meal and borrows a little of that liquid to moisten the crumbs; whether the celery is in the pot with the birds is not stated. If you have none, use a well-seasoned chicken or vegetable stock with a few celery leaves steeped in it.
- Butter substitutePeriod shorthand for margarine, oleomargarine or another cheap fat standing in for butter. One tablespoon of butter does the same job; the substitution was economic rather than culinary.
- Onion juicePressed from a grated onion through cloth, it gives flavour without visible pieces. A quarter teaspoon of grated onion pulp or a pinch of onion powder is the practical equivalent for "a few drops."
- Riced potatoesUse them hot and dry, straight from the ricer. Cold or waterlogged potato turns the mixture pasty, and mashing with a masher rather than ricing gives a gluey stuffing.
- Order mattersThe sequence puts the seasonings into the hot potato, then the wrung-out crumbs, and the yolk last, which at least has the practical effect of keeping the yolk away from the hottest stage. Let the potato cool to warm before adding the yolk if in doubt.
- PigeonsMarket pigeon could mean young squab or an older, tougher bird, which is one reason potting suited them. Squab is available from game butchers; Cornish game hens or quail will take the same filling, adjusting quantity to the birds.
- Cooking temperatureStuffing packed inside a bird must reach 165F at the centre, which for small birds usually means checking the stuffing rather than the breast. Baking it separately in a buttered dish at 350F for 25 minutes is the reliable route.
- YieldAbout one and a quarter cups once the crumbs are wrung out; enough for a few small birds, or a side dish for three or four people if baked alone.
Potting was the standard treatment for pigeon in Anglo-American cookery: small, lean, easily overcooked birds braised close-packed in a covered pot with liquid and aromatics, a method that predates the recipe by centuries. Stuffing them with potato rather than bread alone is the thrifty later touch, and the call for a "butter substitute" suggests a household-economy habit of mind, though such substitutes appear in American cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1940s and cannot by themselves date the book. Domestic pigeon was still an ordinary meat in American cities then, sold cheaply as squab; the passenger pigeon that once glutted the same markets was by then gone, the last captive bird having died in 1914 and wild birds having disappeared around 1900, and the birds in this pot would have been farmed rock doves.