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Fowl, Duck, Game, Hare: Pigeons
No. 147. Piccioni alla minuta (Pigeons) Ingredients: Pigeons, butter, truffles, herbs, fowls' livers, sweetbread, salt, flour, stock, Burgundy. a Prepare two pigeons and put them into a stewpan with two ounces of butter, two truffles cut up, two fowls' livers, half-pound of sweetbread cuttings (boiled), bunch of herbs and salt. Let them brown a little, then add a dessert-spoonful of flour mixed with stock, and half a glass of Burgundy, and stew gently for half an hour.
No. 148. Piccioni in Ripieno (Stuffed Pigeons) Ingredients: Pigeons, sweetbread, parsley, onions, carrots, salt, pepper, bacon, stock, Chablis, fowls' livers, and gizzards.
Cut up a sweetbread, a fowl's liver and gizzard, an onion, a sprig of parsley, and add salt and pepper. Put this stuffing into two pigeons, tie larding bacon over them, and put them into a stewpan with a glass of Chablis, a cup of stock, an onion, and a carrot.
When cooked pass the sauce through a sieve, skim it, add a little more sauce, and pour it over the pigeons.
No. 149. Lepre in istufato (Stewed Hare) Ingredients: Hare, butter, onions, garlic, marjoram, celery, ham, salt, Chablis, stock, mushrooms, spice, tomatoes.
Put into a stewpan three ounces of butter, an onion cut up, a clove of garlic with a cut across it, a sprig of marjoram, and a little cut-up ham. Fry these slightly, put the hare cut up into the same stewpan, and let it get brown.
Then pour a glass of Chablis and a glass of stock over it; add a little tomato sauce or a mashed-up tomato, a pinch of spice, and a few mushrooms; take out the garlic and let the rest stew gently for an hour or more. Keep the cover on the stewpan, but stir the stew occasionally.
No. 150. Lepre Agrodolce (Hare) Ingredients: Hare, vinegar, butter, onion, ham, stock, salt, sugar, chocolate, almonds, raisins.
Cut up a hare and wash the pieces in vinegar, then cook them in butter, chopped onion, some bits of ham, stock and a little salt. Half fill a wine-glass with sugar, and add vinegar until the glass is three - quarters full, mix the vinegar and sugar well together, and when the hare is browned all over and nearly cooked, pour the vinegar over it and add a dessertspoonful of grated chocolate, a few shredded almonds and stoned raisins. Mix all well together and cook for a few minutes more. This is a favourite Roman dish.
Four Italian braises from a book written for cooks with a game larder. The pigeons are the quick dishes; the hare recipes want a long, low pot and a butcher's help.
- Which pigeonThe short cooking time implies young birds — squab, roughly 12-16 oz each, which is what a butcher or game dealer sells today. Half an hour of gentle stewing suits squab; a mature wood pigeon needs considerably longer, or the breasts should be taken off and cooked pink separately.
- Sweetbread cuttings"Half-pound of sweetbread cuttings (boiled)" probably means the trimmings left after a sweetbread has been dressed for another dish. Buy whole veal sweetbreads, soak them in cold water for several hours, blanch briefly, peel off the membrane, press, then cut up. Half a pound of trimmings is generous for two birds; 4-6 oz is plenty.
- Glasses and spoonsA wine glass in period usage is generally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so "half a glass of Burgundy" is roughly 2 tablespoons and "a glass of Chablis" about 1/4 cup. A dessertspoon is 2 teaspoons. These are seasoning quantities of wine, not braising liquid.
- The flour in No. 147Mixing the flour with cold stock before it goes in is the whole point — slurried, it thickens the small amount of liquid into a glaze rather than a lumpy sauce. Add it off the heat and stir before returning to a simmer.
- A garbled lineIn No. 148, "pass the sauce through a sieve, skim it, add a little more sauce" may be a printer's slip for a little more stock, or a knob of butter to finish. Reduce the strained liquid, mount it with cold butter, and pour it over.
- Larding baconThin sheets of unsmoked back fat or fatty pancetta, tied over the breasts to keep them from drying. Streaky bacon works but brings smoke the dish was not built for. Remove the string before serving.
- Hare, and what to do about itA whole hare is 5-8 lb and needs jointing; ask the dealer to do it and to keep the saddle whole. If hare is unavailable, rabbit is the usual substitute but is milder and leaner — cut the stewing time to about 45 minutes. Neither recipe mentions the blood, which in Italian practice is often stirred in at the end off the heat.
- Agrodolce proportionsSugar to fill half a 2 fl oz glass is roughly 1 oz; vinegar to the three-quarter mark adds about 1/2 fl oz. That is a concentrated sweet-sour syrup, and it should go in at the very end and cook only a minute or two — boiled hard it turns to caramel and the sauce splits.
- The chocolateUse unsweetened cocoa or a plain dark chocolate of 70% or more, not modern eating chocolate, which would push an already sweet sauce over. A dessertspoon grated is about 2 teaspoons: it is there for colour and depth, and should not be tasted as chocolate.
- YieldEach pigeon recipe serves two; the hare dishes serve four to six depending on the animal. All four want bread, soft polenta or plain boiled potatoes rather than a second sauce.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was assembled by Mrs W. G. Waters as a frame-tale — ten diners, ten days, Italian regional cookery — for an English readership that then knew Italian food mainly as macaroni. Hare in agrodolce, the sweet-sour treatment with chocolate, raisins and almonds, is the most striking survival here: the combination of vinegar, sugar and dried fruit with dark meat runs back through medieval European cookery, and the chocolate is a post-Columbian addition that Italian kitchens absorbed as a savoury darkener rather than a sweet. Waters calls it "a favourite Roman dish," and versions are still cooked in Lazio and further south, though the same treatment is more often met now with wild boar. The pigeon recipes belong to a different world entirely — one where sweetbread trimmings, fowls' livers and gizzards were simply about, offcuts from the day's other cooking rather than things to be sought out.