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Pigeons En Casserole
Clean and wash thoroughly young pigeons and tie a strip of bacon around each one, or the breasts may be larded, if preferred. Place three tablespoons of butter in a casserole, slice a mild, Spanish onion, set the pigeons on the onion in the casserole and allow them to cook on top of the stove for fifteen minutes. If a coal stove, place the casserole on the back of the range. If a gas stove, protect the casserole from direct heat and insure slow cooking, by placing an asbestos mat under the casserole. After this preliminary cooking, add enough veal broth or white stock to half cover the pigeons and cook in the oven until tender. When nearly done, vegetables may be added. At serving time thicken the liquor in the casserole by stirring into it flour mixed smooth in a little water.
A slow-braise for young pigeons, written for a household that still cooked on coal. Two things need translating: the bird, and the vessel.
- The bird"Young pigeons" means squab — a bird under four weeks old, roughly 12-16 oz, sold frozen by game butchers and some online suppliers. Older pigeon is tough and needs far longer; adult wood pigeon breast is a different dish entirely. Cornish game hen is the closest easy substitute, though the flavor is much milder.
- "Casserole" here is the potIn 1911 the word meant a lidded earthenware or enameled vessel that went from burner to oven. A 4-quart Dutch oven or covered braiser does the job; you need something that will take direct heat and hold the birds in one layer.
- The asbestos matDo not source one. The recipe says plainly what it is for: to protect the casserole from direct heat and to insure slow cooking, earthenware being vulnerable to a bare gas flame. A modern heavy-bottomed pot on low heat, or a cast-iron heat diffuser, solves the same problem.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Braise covered at 325F. Squab is tender in about 45 minutes at that heat; a Cornish hen wants closer to an hour. The breast should register 145-150F if you want it faintly pink, 165F if you do not.
- Larding, or the baconLarding means threading strips of pork fat through the breast with a needle. Pigeon breast is lean and dries fast, which is presumably the point of the instruction. The bacon strip tied around each bird accomplishes the same thing with no special tool — use unsmoked or lightly smoked bacon so it does not dominate the veal stock.
- Veal broth or white stockWhite stock is unroasted bones simmered with aromatics — pale, gelatinous, mild. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical stand-in. Avoid dark roasted beef stock, which will bury the bird.
- When to add vegetables"When nearly done" means about 20 minutes out for carrots and turnips cut small, 10 minutes for peas or mushrooms. Added at the start they collapse into the sauce.
- ThickeningA flour-and-water slurry needs to boil for two or three minutes after it goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. Add it gradually — half the flour may be enough, depending on how much stock has reduced.
- YieldOne squab per person, two for a large appetite. The recipe gives no number of birds; three tablespoons of butter and a single onion suit a small batch cooked in one layer.
The word en casserole was borrowed straight from French usage, where it names the pot rather than the contents, and the modern American sense of a casserole as a baked assembly of things had not yet taken hold. Squab was raised commercially in the United States through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and appears routinely in period cookbooks alongside chicken and duck. The detailed fussing over coal ranges and asbestos mats is a reminder that these earthenware vessels were fragile and that even heat was a genuine problem, solved by whatever the cook could put between the pot and the fire.