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Pigeons Bourgeoise
Clean and truss two pigeons and braise them for forty-five minutes. Stone six olives and shape six pieces of carrot and six pieces of turnip like olives; boil them in a weak stock together with six mushrooms and eight small quenelles. When these are cooked cut the pigeons into four pieces each and put them on a hot dish, pour one-half pint of hot brown sauce over them, arrange the vegetables and quenelles tastefully about and garnish with nicely-shaped croutons of fried bread. This is a very plain and unpretentious but delicious mode of cooking pigeons.
A late-nineteenth-century braise written for a professional brigade: the pigeons are assumed to be young and tender, the brown sauce and quenelles are assumed to be already standing in the kitchen. Filling in those assumptions is most of the work.
- Pigeon means squabThe birds intended here are young domestic pigeons, a few weeks old and around a pound or less dressed — what butchers now sell as squab. Adult or wild birds are tough and gamey and will not be tender in forty-five minutes. Two squab feed two people generously, or four as part of a longer menu.
- The braise, spelled outBrown the trussed birds in fat, then set them in a heavy covered pot with aromatics and stock part-way up the birds, and cook at a bare simmer on the stove or in a low oven — the recipe gives no temperature. Forty-five minutes suits squab; the meat should pull easily from the leg. Squab breast is often served rare today, but a braise is not that dish — here the bird is cooked through.
- Brown sauceHalf a pint is one cup. Oscar means espagnole or a demi-glace, a stock-based brown sauce reduced with mirepoix and tomato. A good reduced veal or chicken stock, lightly thickened and skimmed, stands in for it.
- QuenellesSmall poached dumplings of pounded forcemeat — veal, chicken or pike bound with panada, egg and cream — shaped between two spoons. Eight of them, poached in barely trembling stock so they do not break up. They are the part of this dish most likely to be bought or omitted now.
- Turned vegetables"Shaped like olives" means the carrot and turnip are pared into small tapered ovals, roughly an inch long — what a modern kitchen would call turning. It is decorative and it also makes them cook at the same rate. Simmer them in the weak stock until just yielding, and keep the mushrooms separate as they need less.
- Weak stockA light, unreduced, lightly salted stock — the vegetables are meant to take flavour without being overwhelmed or turning the finished plate salty when the brown sauce goes on.
- CroutonsTriangles or heart shapes of crustless bread fried in clarified butter until crisp. Fry them last and put them on at the table; they soften within minutes of touching the sauce.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf and never actually a cook, published his book in 1896, when pigeon was ordinary American eating rather than a luxury — domestic squab was raised commercially across the northeast, and wild passenger pigeons had been a cheap market bird within living memory before their collapse. À la bourgeoise is a standard French kitchen term for a homely garnish of root vegetables and onions with bacon, as opposed to the elaborate financière and Toulouse garnishes of the same era; Oscar's closing line, calling it "plain and unpretentious," may well be read as a professional's joke, since a dish requiring espagnole sauce, turned vegetables and hand-shaped quenelles counted as plain only in a large hotel kitchen. The book is best read as a record of what the Waldorf's kitchen kept permanently on hand, which is why so many recipes begin at a point most home cooks would consider halfway through.