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Forcemeat for Pigeons
Put into a basin two ounces of butter and beat it until it is nearly a cream, then add a quarter of a pound of breadcrumbs, a little finely-minced parsley, lemon peel, ground mace, grated nutmeg, salt and pepper, and bind the mass together with a well beaten egg.
A plain English breadcrumb forcemeat, meant to be packed into the cavity of pigeons before roasting or braising. The proportions are the whole point: fat, crumb and one egg, seasoned aggressively because it will be diluted by the bird.
- Weights in modern termsTwo ounces of butter is half a stick, 4 tablespoons. A quarter of a pound of breadcrumbs is about 2 cups of fresh soft crumbs, or roughly 1 cup if you use dried. The recipe does not say which; fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf give the lighter texture, while packaged dried crumbs will need a spoonful or two of stock to keep the mixture from going sandy.
- Cream the butter first, and mean itThe butter is beaten to a near-cream before anything else goes in so that it coats the crumbs rather than melting into them in the oven. Have it properly soft at room temperature. Skip this and the forcemeat bakes dense and greasy at the bottom of the bird.
- Lemon peel means zestLemon peel means the rind -- Grated zest only, no white pith, from about half a lemon. In nineteenth-century forcemeats 'lemon peel' generally means the outer yellow rind, though some recipes call for it chopped rather than grated.
- Seasoning quantitiesThe original leaves them to judgment. For this volume, start with 1 tablespoon minced parsley, 1/4 teaspoon ground mace, a good grating of nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon salt and a few turns of pepper. Mace and nutmeg are from the same fruit but are not interchangeable here; mace is the sharper, more savory of the two and carries the mixture.
- Bind lightlyOne egg, well beaten, folded in just until the mass holds together when pressed. Overworking gives a rubbery plug. The forcemeat should be moist enough to shape but not wet.
- YieldEnough to stuff four to six pigeons or squabs, or a pair of small game birds with some left over to roll into balls and roast alongside in the pan drippings.
- Pigeons at the marketFarmed squab is the modern equivalent and is sold frozen at good butchers; quail or Cornish hens work with the same forcemeat. Wild pigeon is legal quarry in some places and restricted in others, so check local rules before substituting.
- Cook it throughAny stuffing containing raw egg that sits inside a bird needs to reach 165F at the center, which usually lags behind the meat. Check the forcemeat with a thermometer, not the bird alone, or bake it separately in a buttered dish for 25 minutes at 375F.
Forcemeat -- generally taken as an alteration of the French farce, ultimately from Latin farcire, to stuff -- was one of the standard building blocks of a professional larder, and cookbooks of the period often carried a run of them: one for veal, one for fish, one for game, one for pigeons. This is the simplest family, a panada of crumb and butter bound with egg, as opposed to the pounded veal-and-suet quenelle mixtures used for garnishes. Pigeon was still ordinary restaurant meat when Oscar Tschirky assembled this book at the Waldorf in the 1890s; the birds are small, lean and quick-cooking, and a buttered crumb stuffing both padded out the portion and kept the breast from drying. The mace and nutmeg mark it as a conservative, English-derived recipe -- that pairing of sweet spice with parsley and lemon runs back through Victorian and Georgian stuffing recipes.