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Chartreuse of Pigeons
Peel an equal quantity of carrots and turnips and cut them into small balls with a vegetable cutter and boil them separately in salt and water, keeping them a little firm. Drain, wipe them on a cloth and leave them till cold. Cut the fillets off some young pigeons, trim away the sinewy skin, beat them lightly, season with salt and pepper and lay them in a buttered sautepan. Thickly butter a plain border mould, arrange the vegetable balls in circles alternately round the sides, fill the hollow of the mould with potatoes that have been boiled and mashed with a little butter and stand the mould in a bain-marie for an hour. When ready, fry the fillets over a quick fire, turning them. After they are cooked, drain off the butter, pour over two or three tablespoonfuls of glaze, and keep them hot. Turn the decorated border out of the mould onto a hot dish and fill the center with some chopped and cooked vegetables that have been mixed with some bechamel sauce. Arrange the fillets almost upright on the border letting them slightly overlap each other, and serve with a sauceboatful of brown sauce which has been prepared with the legs and trimmings of the pigeons.
Curried Pigeons, Indian Put four teaspoonfuls of ground onions, a teaspoonful each of ground chillies and turmeric, half a teaspoonful of ground ginger and one-fourth teaspoonful of ground garlic into a saucepan with two ounces of boiling fat and cook until the ingredients are slightly browned; add four young pigeons each cut up into quarters and about a teaspoonful of salt, and cook until they are browned; then add two breakfast cupfuls of water and continue to cook slowly till the pigeons are tender. Turn the curry out on a hot dish, and serve very hot.
Two dishes run together here: a moulded chartreuse built from squab breasts, and a straightforward Indian-style curry using the whole birds. Both assume a kitchen that butchers its own pigeons and keeps meat glaze on hand.
- The hinge: the mould must set, not cookThe buttered border mould goes into a bain-marie — a pan of hot water — for an hour so the mashed potato firms into a mass that holds the vegetable balls in place. Keep the water at a bare simmer rather than a boil; the recipe gives no oven and no temperature. If the water boils hard the potato weeps and the border risks collapsing when turned out.
- PigeonsThese are young pigeons, i.e. squab, sold frozen by game butchers and some Asian markets, generally around a pound each. Each bird gives two small breast fillets; the recipe does not say how many birds to use — the four pigeons belong to the curry that follows. Wild pigeon is tougher and stronger and will not behave the same way.
- Doneness of the filletsSquab breast is dark meat and is usually served pink today, like duck. Over a "quick fire" — a heavy pan on high heat — that is about a minute to ninety seconds a side. Cooked through it turns liver-like and dry.
- Glaze and brown sauce"Glaze" is glace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. Commercial demi-glace concentrate stands in. The brown sauce is made from the legs, backs and trimmings, browned and simmered — the legs are not wasted, they are the sauce.
- Vegetable ballsA "vegetable cutter" is a melon baller; a small one gives pea-sized spheres, which look best in concentric rings. Boil carrot and turnip in separate pans, salted, and pull them while still resistant — about 3 minutes — since they get another hour of heat in the mould.
- Breakfast cupfulsIn the curry, a breakfast cup is larger than a teacup: generally reckoned at 8-10 fl oz, so two cupfuls is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of water. Two ounces of fat is 4 tablespoons.
- Ground spices"Ground onions" and "ground garlic" most likely mean wet pastes pounded in a mortar rather than powders — use grated fresh onion and garlic. A teaspoonful of ground chillies is hot by modern supermarket standards; cayenne is the nearest equivalent.
- Curry timingQuartered squab simmers tender in 25-35 minutes. Fry the spice paste until the fat separates and the colour deepens before the birds go in, or the turmeric stays raw and chalky.
A chartreuse is one of the set pieces of nineteenth-century French service: vegetables cut into uniform shapes, packed decoratively against the wall of a mould, and turned out as an edible container for meat or game. The name is traditionally traced to the Carthusian monks, whose meatless diet supposedly gave rise to a dish that hid flesh beneath a facade of vegetables, though the story is repeated far more often than it is documented. By the time Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel at the turn of the twentieth century, the chartreuse had become pure display a way of showing that a brigade had the hands and the hours for it. The curried pigeons follow immediately, with their turmeric and chillies and no garnish at all.