No. 1963

Pigeons, Huntress Style—Breasts

Filets de Pigeons Chasseresse

Raise the fillets from six pigeons leaving the minion fillet adhere, pare and suppress the skin, then salt and lay them in a sautoir with butter and lemon juice; place this on a hot fire and as soon as they are firm to the touch, remove to place under a weight; then pare again and cover one side only with a salpicon of sweetbreads, truffles and mushrooms mingled with well-reduced allemande sauce (No. 407). Cover this salpicon with chicken quenelle forcemeat (No. 89) diluted with a little cream. Dust the tops with bread-crumbs and grated parmesan cheese, mask with butter and lay the breasts in a sautoir, having the bottom covered with thin slices of fat pork, set it in the hot oven and when the breasts are of a fine color and very warm, dress them in a circle, pouring a Diana sauce (No. 460) in the middle.

← No. 1962 Pigeons Garnished with Montglas Cases—Stuffe Pigeons & Squabs No. 1964 Pigeons, Monarch Style—Smothered →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a larder of finished sauces and forcemeats already on hand; the hinge for a home cook is deciding which of the four cross-referenced preparations to make and which to approximate. Read it as an assembly job: cook and press the breasts first, build the topping, then bake only long enough to set and colour.

Squab, not wild pigeonSix birds yield twelve breast fillets. Farmed squab of about 12–16 oz each is the closest match and is sold frozen by game butchers; the "minion fillet" is the small tenderloin strip on the underside of the breast, which he wants left attached.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow sauté pan, not a casserole in the modern sense. Any heavy skillet wide enough to hold the fillets in one layer will do for both the searing and the final baking.
"Firm to the touch" means barely doneThe breasts are only stiffened in butter and lemon over high heat — a minute or two a side — because they finish in the oven. Squab breast dries and turns liverish if cooked through at this stage.
Pressing under a weightChilling the seared fillets flat under a plate and a weight compacts them so they can be trimmed to an even shape and will hold the salpicon without slumping. Give them at least half an hour in the refrigerator.
The salpiconSweetbreads, truffle and mushroom cut in small neat dice. Sweetbreads must be soaked, blanched, peeled and poached before dicing; the allemande (No. 407) is a velouté finished with egg yolk, and it should be reduced thick enough that the mixture mounds rather than runs.
Quenelle forcemeat as a lidNo. 89 is a pounded chicken forcemeat; slackened with cream it is piped or spread over the salpicon and sets in the oven like a light mousseline. A food processor does the pounding in seconds — keep everything cold or it breaks.
Fat porkThin sheets of fresh pork back fat line the pan so the underside does not scorch or stick. Unsmoked barding fat or fresh fatback is correct; bacon brings smoke and salt that do not belong here.
"Hot oven"Ranhofer gives no temperature; something in the range of 400–425°F suits the job. Eight to ten minutes is usually enough to gratinate the crumb and parmesan and heat the forcemeat through — the phrase "very warm" is deliberate, since further cooking ruins the breasts.
Diana sauceNo. 460 is a peppery game sauce in the poivrade family; the classic sauce Diane is a poivrade finished with cream and garnished with truffle and hard-boiled egg white, though Ranhofer's own version at No. 460 is not reproduced here and may differ in detail. A well-made pepper sauce built on a game or duck stock stands in for it.
YieldTwelve dressed fillets serve six as a first course, or four as a main with the sauce pooled in the centre of the ring.

A Little History

Chasseresse is simply "huntress," and the name is often read as a pointer to the sauce: Diana, goddess of the hunt, may lie behind the peppery cream-finished poivrade that Ranhofer pools inside the ring of breasts, though his own intent is not recorded. Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is the record of that restaurant's repertoire, which is built almost entirely out of preparations a large brigade kept standing: allemande sauce, chicken quenelle forcemeat, a sauce from the game section, sweetbreads and truffles already trimmed for other uses. Pigeon appears constantly in nineteenth-century American hotel cookery, and squab seems to have been readily available to hotel kitchens. The technique of searing a fillet, pressing it flat, then masking one side with a garnish and a forcemeat before gratinating is a hallmark of the period's grande cuisine, where a small bird was rarely served as itself if it could be turned into something composed.