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Broiled Squabs
Singe and pluck a couple of squabs, cut off the feet and heads and wipe them with a wet cloth. Butter a double gridiron, lay the birds between the bars, and brown them quickly on both sides over a clear brisk fire. Shake a little pepper and salt over them, place them on a dish, lay slices of orange round, and serve.
Broiled Squabs on Toast with Bacon Singe, draw, and cut off the necks from three good-sized squabs; split them without detaching them, lay them on a dish and season with one pinch of pepper, one-half pinch of salt, and one tablespoonful of sweet oil; roll them well, and broil them for six minutes on each side. Prepare a dish with six toasts, arrange the squabs over, and spread one gill of maitre d'hotel butter on the top. Decorate the dish with six slices of broiled bacon, and serve. Squabs, Chipolata Prepare and roast half a dozen squabs, and serve them with one pint of hot chipolata garnishing on a hot dish, with the squabs neatly arranged over.
Three short methods for young pigeon, written when squab came into the kitchen whole and feathered. The birds are small and cook fast; the risk is not undercooking but drying them out.
- Buying squabSquab now arrives plucked, drawn and frozen from game dealers and better butchers, usually 12-16 oz each. One bird per person for the toast version, or half a bird as a first course. Skip the singeing and plucking entirely.
- Double gridironA hinged wire broiler that clamps the birds flat between two grids, so they can be turned as a unit over coals. A hinged fish basket does the same job, or press the split birds under a weighted pan in a heavy skillet.
- A clear brisk fireCoals burned down past the flame stage, glowing and free of smoke, roughly the heat you would use for a steak. Under a modern broiler, use the highest setting with the birds 4-5 inches from the element.
- Split without detachingSpatchcocking: cut through the backbone and open the bird out flat so it lies in one piece. This is what makes six minutes a side realistic, and it is the instruction that decides whether the dish works.
- DonenessSquab is served pink at the breast, around 135-140F, which is traditional for pigeon and gives the meat its character. Twelve minutes total suits a split bird of this size; a whole one takes longer and cooks less evenly.
- Sweet oil and a gillSweet oil is plain olive oil, not the fruity green kind. A gill is half a cup, which is a great deal of maitre d'hotel butter for three birds -- butter creamed with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Two or three tablespoons is closer to modern taste.
- Chipolata garnishNot simply sausages. A classic chipolata garnish is a braise of small chipolata sausages with glazed chestnuts, button onions, diced salt pork and sometimes carrot, bound with a Madeira-flavoured brown sauce. A pint of it serves six.
- Roasting the chipolata versionThe recipe gives no oven temperature. A very hot oven, around 450F for roughly 12-15 minutes depending on size, is the usual modern route to a pink breast; check with a thermometer rather than the clock. Rest them five minutes before they go over the garnish.
Squab -- a young pigeon taken from the nest at about four weeks, before it has flown -- was common American market poultry around 1900, raised in commercial lofts and cheap enough to appear on hotel menus in quantity. Three separate treatments sit stacked together here with no transition, which reads more like a working kitchen's repertoire written down than a book teaching a beginner one dish. The chipolata garnish points back to the French grande cuisine that governed American hotel cooking of the period, where a named garnish was a fixed formula a cook on the line was expected to know. Pigeon largely fell out of the American diet as chicken production industrialised in the mid-twentieth century, and squab is now a specialty item priced accordingly.