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Chaudfroid of Pigeons
Prepare and truss the pigeons as for roasting, and season them with salt and pepper. Put them in a baking-dish, pour round some veal stock, and bake them, basting occasionally with the liquor in the pan. When done, drain, and cut them into convenient-sized pieces. When the stock is cold, skim off all the fat, pour it into a small saucepan, add the white of an egg, and boil it till reduced to a jelly. Then strain it through a napkin and let it get cold. Place the pigeons on a dish, cut the jelly into croutons and place round them, garnish with a few sprigs of green watercress, and serve.
A cold pigeon dish that stands or falls on the stock: the aspic is doing all the work, and the birds are simply roasted, jointed and set among it. Two techniques in the original need translation.
- The hinge: clarify gently, do not boil hardEgg white added to cold stock and brought up slowly forms a raft that traps sediment; a rolling boil shreds it and leaves the jelly cloudy. Bring it to a bare tremble, hold ten to fifteen minutes without stirring, then ladle it out through a napkin or double muslin without disturbing the raft.
- Whether it will set at allThe recipe assumes a homemade veal stock rich enough in gelatin to set firm on its own. A carton of stock will not. Test a spoonful on a cold saucer in the refrigerator; if it stays liquid, soften about 1 tablespoon of powdered gelatin per pint and dissolve it in the warm clarified stock before chilling.
- PigeonsThe bird here is what is now generally sold as squab, roughly 12-16 oz dressed, available from game butchers and by mail. Two poussins or Cornish hens of similar weight substitute reasonably, though the meat is paler and milder.
- Oven and timingBake at 375-400F. Squab are done at about 20-25 minutes for pink breast meat, 30-35 if you want them cooked through; the legs benefit from the longer time. Overcooked they turn dry and livery, which no amount of jelly will disguise.
- The stock in the panPour in only enough veal stock to come a half inch up the dish, so the birds roast rather than braise. That liquid, plus the roasting juices, is what becomes the jelly, so keep every drop.
- SkimmingChill the pan liquid thoroughly first. The fat lifts off as a solid disc, which is far cleaner than skimming warm stock and matters here because any fat left behind will cloud the finished aspic.
- "Croutons" of jellyNot bread. Pour the clarified stock into a shallow tray to a depth of about half an inch, chill until firm, then cut into neat diamonds or dice and lift them out with a palette knife.
- Yield and serviceOne bird per person as a main course, half a bird as a first course. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead, keep refrigerated until just before serving, and bring the plate out cold — the jelly softens quickly in a warm room.
Chaud-froid — literally "hot-cold" — is the French term for a dish cooked hot, then finished, coated and served cold, and it was one of the pillars of the late nineteenth-century cold buffet: the technique that made a sideboard of glossy, jellied birds and galantines possible before refrigeration was reliable. A strict chaud-froid is masked in a sauce enriched with aspic; Oscar's version is the plainer sort, the birds simply set off by chopped jelly and watercress, which suited hotel service where a dish had to be composed quickly and look immaculate. Pigeon appears constantly in American hotel cookery of this era, and Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, is thick with them. Veal stock reduced to a natural jelly is the older method throughout; commercial powdered gelatin was available by this date, but a kitchen with a stockpot going all day would have had little call for it.