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Pigeon Pie
Pick and draw some young pigeons, wash them, lay them in a saucepan of boiling water, add a piece of onion and a little salt, cover the pan and boil until tender. Take the pigeons out, drain them, and put in each a teaspoonful of butter, a small quantity of salt, pepper, thyme and a hard-boiled egg. Lay them in a deep bakingdish and strain their cooking liquor over them; put in one teacupful of cream, one tablespoonful of butter, two tablespoonfuls of breadcrumbs, one tablespoonful of minced parsley and thyme, and a pinch of salt. Cover the pie with a rich crust, ornament it, stick four of the claws in the crust, and bake it. Serve either hot or cold. If cold set the pie-dish on an under dish with a napkin folded about it, and garnish freely with sprigs of parsley.
A two-stage pie: the birds are poached whole until tender, then baked under a crust with their own broth enriched with cream. Everything hinges on the first stage, since the pastry stage is too short to tenderize anything.
- The birds"Young pigeons" means squab, sold dressed at game butchers and many Asian markets, commonly around 12-16 oz each. The recipe gives no number of birds; the "four of the claws" stuck in the crust could come from as few as two. Wild-caught dove and some wild pigeons are subject to hunting regulation, and wild birds are older, tougher and leaner than the recipe assumes.
- Pick and drawPlucking and gutting. Squab now arrives fully dressed, so begin at "wash them." Save the hearts and livers if they come with the birds and add them to the poaching water for a better liquor.
- Boil until tenderSquab is tender fast; a gentle simmer of 20 to 30 minutes for whole birds is plenty. Hold it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, which shreds the skin and clouds the broth you are about to use as the pie's sauce.
- A teacupfulRoughly 3/4 cup here, though period teacups ran from 1/2 to 1 cup and the amount is genuinely elastic. Combined with the strained poaching liquor it should come partway up the birds, not submerge them.
- The stuffed eggA whole peeled hard-boiled egg goes inside each bird along with the butter and herbs. It is structural as much as anything, holding the cavity full so the bird keeps its shape under the crust.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake at 400F until the crust is set and browned, 30 to 40 minutes; the filling only needs to come up to heat and thicken slightly.
- The clawsFeet pushed through the pastry are a long-standing convention for pigeon pie; the usual explanation, that they showed the diner what was under the crust, is traditional lore rather than documented fact. Skip it without loss, and note that dressed squab rarely comes with feet attached.
- Serving coldThe cream sauce sets soft rather than firm, so a cold pie will not slice cleanly like a raised pie. The folded napkin around the dish was standard service for anything sent to table in its own baking vessel.
Pigeon pie is one of the oldest surviving English pie fillings, and until the nineteenth century it was ordinary rather than luxurious food: manor houses and farms kept dovecotes, and the squab taken from the nest before it flew was a reliable source of tender meat in the lean months. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms in the 1890s, reliance on the dovecote was gradually giving way and squab had become a restaurant delicacy supplied by commercial breeders, and it appears in his book among the hotel's kitchen standards. The recipe's habits are older than the hotel, though "pick and draw" and the claws set upright in the crust appear in English cookery books a century or more before Oscar wrote, the whole egg in the cavity is often said to be an older English habit as well, and the practice of poaching the birds first is what made the dish work with a short-baked rich pastry rather than a long-cooked one.