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Timbale of Pigeons with Truffles
Pluck, singe and clean eight pigeons, truss them, chop them into halves, put them in a sautepan with butter or bacon fat, adding a tablespoonful of parsley, two table-spoonfuls of mushrooms, and four tablespoonfuls of truffles, all finely chopped. Season to taste with grated nutmeg, salt and pepper, and boil over a slow fire for fifteen minutes. Let them cool in the liquor, and remove as many bones as possible. Fill a mould with paste, mask the bottom and sides with game forcemeat, put in the halves of pigeons, with a few slices of truffles intermixed, pour over the butter from the fryingpan, cover over with a little more of the paste, set the mould in a moderate oven, and bake for an hour and a half. Turn it out when done, and serve. Squabs, American Style Singe, draw and truss half a dozen fine fat squabs, stuff them with American forcemeat, and place them in a roastingpan with one pinch of salt evenly distributed, and one-half ounce of butter spread over. Place them in a hot oven and roast for eighteen or twenty minutes. Remove them from the oven, untruss and dress them on a hot dish. Skim the fat off the gravy, and add to it one gill of rich broth; let it come to the boil, and strain into a saucebowl. Decorate the dish with a small quantity of fresh watercress, arrange a slice of broiled bacon over each bird, and serve.
Two related dishes run together here: a raised pie of braised pigeon under a pastry crust, and a straightforward roast of squab. Both assume a cook who can bone birds and make forcemeat without being told.
- Pigeons and squabsBoth birds in this entry are domestic pigeon; a squab is a young bird, usually about four weeks old and not yet flown, sold at well under a pound. Order them from a game dealer or a Chinese butcher, where they are sold plucked and drawn. Eight birds for the timbale is a large pie -- it will serve eight to ten.
- "Paste" means hot-water crust"Paste" -- The recipe says only "paste." A mould lined with paste and baked ninety minutes points to a firm raised-pie crust rather than a short, buttery one: a hot-water or lard paste holds its shape against the weight of the filling and the long bake, where a butter pastry is likelier to slump and leak.
- "Boil over a slow fire for fifteen minutes"This is a braise, not a boil. Keep the pan at a bare tremble so the halved birds firm up and give off their juices without the flesh tightening -- they will finish cooking through the long bake.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives only "moderate" and "hot." By the usual modern equivalents that is around 350F for the timbale and roughly 425-450F for the squabs; at that heat eighteen to twenty minutes will leave the breast meat rosy, which is how squab is generally served.
- Boning the halvesCool the birds fully in their liquor before you pick out bones -- warm pigeon shreds. Rib cage, back and thigh bones come away easily; leave the small wing bones if they resist, and warn whoever is carving.
- Forcemeat"Game forcemeat" is a farce of dark meat -- pigeon trim, hare or venison -- pounded with pork fat, eggs and seasoning. "American forcemeat" is not defined here; it is generally taken to be a bread-based stuffing with butter and herbs, closer to what would now be called dressing.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. That is all the broth the pan gravy for six squabs needs; more and it stops tasting of the birds.
- TrufflesFour tablespoons chopped plus slices to intermix comes to a couple of ounces of black truffle. Preserved truffle in its own juice is the honest substitute; truffle oil is not.
- Turning the pie outRest the timbale twenty minutes before unmoulding, so the butter and jelly set enough to hold the walls. Run a thin knife round the rim first.
Oscar Tschirky was not a cook -- he was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and the 1896 book that carries his name is a compendium of the hotel's kitchen repertoire rather than his own hand at the stove. A timbale takes its name from the drum-shaped mould (from the Arabic tabl, drum, reaching French by way of the Spanish atabal), and in nineteenth-century grand cookery it covered anything built in such a mould, from a rice case to a full raised pie like this one. Pigeon appears constantly in American cookbooks of the period because it was still genuinely cheap, with domestic squab supplying hotel kitchens once the wild market birds of mid-century had gone. The pairing of the two recipes on one page is telling -- the elaborate French timbale for the dining room, and the plain roasted squab with bacon and watercress labelled "American Style," the same bird served two ways for two kinds of guest.