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Stewed Pigeons with Green Peas
Truss two pigeons with their legs inwards, cutting off the necks and washing the livers and returning them again to the insides of the birds. Blanch four ounces of streaky bacon, cut it into squares removing all rind, and fry it in a stewpan with one ounce of butter. When lightly browned take the bacon out, put the pigeons in and fry them brown, then remove them and place them one side with the bacon. Stir two tablespoonfuls of flour in the stewpan with the fat, and when cooked pour in one and one-half pints of broth. When boiling strain it through a conical strainer into another stewpan; put in the pigeons and bacon, one quart of green peas, a bunch of sweet herbs, and pepper and salt to taste. Cook slowly for half an hour, then take them out, remove the strings and place them on a hot dish. Take the bunch of herbs out, skim the fat off the peas, put them and the bacon round the birds, and serve with a sauceboatful of the strained gravy.
A straightforward brown stew from the Waldorf's kitchen, built on the old sequence of bacon, fond, flour and broth. Two things need attention: sourcing the birds, and keeping the peas from cooking to grey mush.
- The birds"Pigeons" here means young domestic squab, sold today at 12-16 oz each and available frozen from game and poultry suppliers. Two feed two people; if you want four servings, double everything rather than stretching the sauce.
- Livers inside the birdSquab are often sold with the liver still attached, which is what the recipe assumes. If yours come cleaned, buy a few chicken livers, rinse them and tuck one into each cavity as directed, or leave them out.
- Trussing legs inwardsThe legs are folded back and tied against the body so the bird holds a compact shape through frying and stewing. Plain butcher's twine, cut off before serving as the recipe says.
- Blanching the baconTwo or three minutes in simmering water, then drained and dried. Period bacon was far saltier and smokier than most supermarket bacon; with modern streaky bacon or pancetta the blanch is optional, but it does keep the finished gravy from turning salty as it reduces.
- MeasuresOne and a half pints of broth is 3 cups. A quart of green peas means shelled peas, roughly 1 1/4 lb — which takes something like 3 to 4 lb in the pod, or a 1 lb bag of frozen peas plus a little more.
- Peas and timingThirty minutes of slow cooking suits the squab but destroys peas, which need 3-5 minutes if fresh and young and barely 2 from frozen. Stew the birds and bacon in the sauce for the half hour, then add the peas at the end to heat through.
- Sweet herbsA bouquet garni: parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied together, or bundled in cheesecloth so it lifts out cleanly.
- Slowly means slowlyA bare simmer. Squab breast is dark and lean and goes dry and livery if boiled hard; the thigh should give easily when the birds come out.
- The gravyTwo tablespoons of flour to 3 cups of broth gives a thin, glossy sauce, not a gravy. If it is looser than you want, strain it into a wide pan and reduce for a few minutes before it goes to the sauceboat.
Stewed pigeon with peas belongs to a long European tradition of cooking young birds with the first vegetables of the season — the French pigeons aux petits pois, itself a cousin of the older habit of braising squab with lettuce or peas as a spring dish. Pigeons were a practical household bird for centuries: a dovecote produced tender squab without dedicated pasture or grain fields of its own, the birds foraging widely instead, which is why they turn up so often in English and American cookbooks well into the nineteenth century. By the time Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel at the turn of the twentieth century, squab is often said to have shifted from thrifty to luxurious, a small, dark-fleshed bird priced for restaurant menus rather than farm tables, and it appears in this book alongside the terrapin and canvasback duck that defined hotel dining of the period. The method — blanched bacon, a brown roux made in the fat left from frying, broth strained through a conical strainer (a chinois) — is straight professional practice, the sort of thing a hotel brigade did as a matter of course.