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Roasted Squabs
Singe, draw, cut off the necks and wipe neatly six fine squabs; put them in a roastingpan with one-half pinch of salt, evenly spread, and a little butter; place the pan in a sharp oven and cook the birds for twelve or fourteen minutes; then remove from the oven, untruss and dress them on a hot dish on which have been previously placed six small canapes of game, one on each canape. Decorate the dish neatly with fresh watercress. Skim the fat from the gravy and add to it one gill of white broth. Allow it to just come to the boil; then strain it into a saucebowl, and serve.
A restaurant recipe written for cooks who already knew how to handle a bird and a hot oven. The two things that need translating are the oven heat and the game canapés the squabs are meant to sit on.
- "Sharp oven"A hot oven, near the top of the range's heat; roughly 450–475F is the usual modern equivalent. The short twelve-to-fourteen-minute timing depends on that heat; at 350F the birds will not brown or cook through in the time the recipe allows.
- A gillHalf a cup. "White broth" is an unseasoned light stock of veal or chicken, not browned — its job is to loosen the pan drippings without darkening the sauce.
- Squabs todayFarmed squab runs about 14–18 oz whole and comes from the supplier already drawn and singed, so the first half of the first sentence is done for you. Six birds is six servings; three will do for a smaller table with the same method.
- DonenessTwelve to fourteen minutes in a very hot oven leaves the breast rosy and the legs barely set, which is how squab was and still is served in classical kitchens. If you want it cooked through to the USDA poultry recommendation of 165F, expect to add roughly ten minutes and accept a drier breast.
- "Canapes of game"Not a modern canapé. These are small rounds or rectangles of bread fried in butter and spread with a game or liver forcemeat — chicken liver pâté or a rough farce of the birds' own livers works. They catch the juices, which is the point of them.
- UntrussingCut and pull the string while the birds are hot but let them sit two or three minutes before plating; the juices settle and the legs stop springing out of shape.
- The sauceSkim the fat properly, then bring the stock and drippings just to the boil and no further. This is a thin jus, not a reduction — boiling it down concentrates the salt already spread over the birds and turns it harsh.
- The watercressDress it dry and add it at the last second. It is the conventional garnish for a roast bird, its pepperiness set against the rich meat; a squeeze of lemon on the leaves is in keeping.
Squab — a young domestic pigeon taken before it has flown — was a standard luxury bird on American hotel menus at the turn of the twentieth century, and it appears here as one of the quick à la minute roasts: small, expensive, and on the plate in a quarter of an hour. Pigeon had been eaten in the United States for centuries, first largely as wild game (the passenger pigeon was still being sold by the barrel within living memory of this book), then increasingly from squab farms as the wild flocks collapsed. The arrangement described — each bird set on a fried bread canapé spread with game forcemeat, the dish banked with watercress and a thin jus passed separately — belongs to the grand-hotel repertoire of the period, the world in which Oscar Tschirky worked as the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, where the garnish was as codified as the cooking.