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Roasted Pigeons
It is well to stuff pigeons for roasting with a well-seasoned veal forcemeat. Their flavor is much improved by this means, and parsley fried in butter can then be served with them. The stuffing should consist of minced raw veal, fat bacon, breadcrumbs soaked in milk, and all mixed together and well seasoned. In America it is usual to serve roasted pigeons with red currant jelly or stewed apples without sugar, dressed celery or other salad, mashed turnips or squash. All are considered suitable for these birds. Roasted Pigeons Stuffed with Chestnuts Singe and draw two pigeons and truss them as for roasting. Boil one-half pint of chestnuts, and when tender peel and pound them in a mortar with the same quantity of finely-chopped bacon. Stuff the pigeons with the chestnut mixture, put a vine leaf on each breast and bind them round with a thin slice of fat bacon; then roast them in a hot oven for half an hour. Chop fine the livers and mix them with a sprig of chopped parsley, a tablespoonful each of sauce and gravy, a lump of butter, a piece of grated lemon peel; add a little grated nutmeg, salt and pepper. Stir the mixture over the fire for a few minutes. Put the birds on a hot dish, and serve them with the sauce.
Two recipes in one entry: a general note on veal forcemeat for pigeons, and a specific chestnut-stuffed roast. The chestnut version is the one with numbers attached.
- The bird"Pigeon" here means squab, a young domestic bird of roughly 12 to 16 oz, sold frozen by game butchers and some Asian markets. Wild pigeon is leaner, tougher and a different proposition entirely; quail, being much smaller, will need appreciably less time, while a poussin is a similar size or larger and will not.
- A hot ovenRead that as roughly 425-450F. Half an hour at that heat leaves a stuffed squab well done by modern eyes, which is what a raw-meat stuffing requires; unstuffed, modern practice is often to pull squab at 135-140F in the breast.
- Stuffing and temperatureBoth forcemeats go in raw — minced veal and bacon in one, pounded chestnut and bacon in the other. Whatever the breast reads, the centre of the stuffing needs 165F, so check there rather than in the meat. Cooking the forcemeat separately in a small dish and serving it alongside sidesteps the whole problem.
- Half a pint of chestnutsA volume measure, and the recipe takes it before boiling and peeling; reckon on something like 150 g of peeled nuts. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts save the boiling and peeling; a food processor replaces the mortar, though pulse rather than purée or the stuffing turns pasty.
- "A tablespoonful each of sauce and gravy""Sauce" in a kitchen of this date usually means a bottled table sauce — Worcestershire, Harvey's, mushroom ketchup. The quantity is small enough that Worcestershire is a safe reading. "Gravy" means meat stock or pan juices, not a thickened flour gravy.
- Vine leaf and bardThe leaf perfumes the breast and the bacon keeps it from drying; brined vine leaves from a jar work if rinsed. Remove the bacon for the last five minutes if you want any colour on the skin.
- The liver sauceSquab are often sold with the giblets included, though not always. Stir the chopped liver mixture over gentle heat only until it loses its raw colour — a couple of minutes. Pushed further it turns grainy and metallic.
- YieldTwo birds, two servings, with the accompaniments Oscar lists: currant jelly or unsweetened stewed apple, a dressed salad, mashed turnip or squash.
Pigeon was still ordinary food in America when this book appeared — dovecotes and squab farms supplied hotel kitchens. The techniques here are straight out of the French repertoire Oscar Tschirky worked in: farce of raw veal and fat bacon, a vine leaf on the breast, a bard of pork fat, and the liver worked into the sauce so nothing is wasted. The list of American accompaniments is the telling part — currant jelly, unsweetened stewed apples, mashed turnip — showing a New York kitchen fitting a European bird into the sweet-and-savoury habits of the American table, the same instinct that puts cranberry beside turkey. The passenger pigeon, hunted commercially in enormous numbers through the nineteenth century, was effectively gone from the wild by the time these lines were printed.