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Fried Pigeons with Celery
Cut three pigeons into halves, brush them over with egg, dip them into breadcrumbs, plunge them into a pan of boiling lard, and fry them. Have ready a puree of celery, put it on a dish, place the halves of pigeons on top, and serve with croutons of fried bread for garnish.
Four lines of instruction that assume a kitchen where squab was ordinary and a puree was something you already knew how to make. The gaps are worth filling in.
- The bird"Pigeon" here means squab, a young domestic pigeon of about 1 lb, sold frozen by game butchers and many Asian markets. Do not substitute wild pigeon; buy farmed birds, and expect one half-bird per person as a first course, a whole bird as a main.
- Frying temperature"Boiling lard" is a temperature, not a state — lard does not boil, and refined lard begins to smoke somewhere around 370–400F depending on how it is rendered. Hold the fat at 350-360F so the crumb browns in the four or five minutes the meat needs.
- Getting them to cook throughBone-in halves of raw squab will colour long before the thigh is done. Flatten each half firmly under the heel of your hand before breading, and finish in a 375F oven if the crust is ready first. Squab is traditionally served pink at the breast; if that is not to your taste, take it to 165F at the thigh.
- Breading that stays onThe recipe goes straight from egg to crumb. Dust the halves with seasoned flour first, then egg, then crumbs, and rest them ten minutes before frying, or the coating will slide off in the fat.
- Puree of celeryStalk celery, not celeriac, is what Oscar meant. Sweat the sliced stalks in butter with a little onion, moisten with stock, cook until quite soft, and puree; a boiled potato or a spoonful of thick bechamel gives it body, since celery alone is watery. Pass it through a sieve for the texture a Waldorf kitchen would have expected.
- CroutonsFried bread, not dry baked cubes — triangles of crustless white bread browned in clarified butter, drained, and set around the rim of the dish.
- YieldThree pigeons give six halves: three main courses or six appetiser portions. Scale the celery at roughly one large head per three birds.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, and his 1896 Cook Book reads as a record of what a large American hotel kitchen actually sent out. Squab appears throughout it because pigeon was then a standard market bird in the United States, raised commercially and familiar enough to turn up regularly on hotel menus; the wild passenger pigeon that had once glutted the same markets had by then already been driven from commerce. Celery is the other period marker. In the 1890s it was a prestige vegetable, sold blanched and bundled, often set out in cut-glass vases on the table, and Michigan's celery fields around Kalamazoo were shipping it nationally. Turning it into a sieved puree to serve under a fried bird is the sort of French treatment of an American ingredient that the Waldorf's reputation was built on.