No. 2010

Squabs a l'Impromptu—Sauted

Pigeonneaux Sautés a l'Impromptu

After the squabs are prepared the same as for broiling, fry them in clarified butter, and when done, dress. Fry and cook colorless a teaspoonful of chopped shallots for each pigeon, add to it a little flour, moisten lightly with stock (No. 194a) and white wine, boil and skim; reduce this rapidly over a hot fire and just when ready to serve, incorporate a little fine butter, lemon juice and chopped parsley; pour this over the squabs and serve at once.

← No. 2009 Squabs a la Flourens Pigeons & Squabs No. 2011 Squabs a la Stanislas—Stuffed →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A quick pan-sauté with a shallot-and-white-wine pan sauce, written in Ranhofer's usual shorthand for cooks who already knew the house methods. Two things carry the dish: butchering the birds flat so they cook evenly, and finishing the sauce off the heat so the butter binds instead of splitting.

"Prepared the same as for broiling"That means split down the backbone, opened out flat, breastbone and rib tips cracked, and the bird lightly flattened — what a modern kitchen calls spatchcocking. Flat birds sit in full contact with the pan and finish in one turn.
Squab and its sizeA squab is a young domestic pigeon, roughly four weeks old, usually sold dressed at around 12–18 oz. Order from a game or halal butcher, or online; supermarkets rarely stock them. One bird per person.
DonenessSquab is dark-meated and is usually cooked pink rather than to the well-done stage used for chicken; many kitchens take the breast to around 130–135°F and the legs a little further. Roughly 4–5 minutes skin side down in the butter and 3–4 on the second side, then a short rest, though this varies with the bird. Cooked through, it turns dry and livery.
Clarified butterNot a period affectation — whole butter's milk solids burn at the heat needed to color the skin. Ghee works, or clarify your own and keep the pan at a steady medium-high.
Stock No. 194aA cross-reference to one of the stocks in The Epicurean's soup section; check the entry itself for the exact composition. A good unsalted chicken stock stands in; reduce it hard, since the recipe relies on reduction rather than added thickening for body.
"A little flour"Genuinely unquantified. For four birds, about a teaspoon of flour into 4 teaspoons of softened shallot is enough to give the sauce cling without turning it into a velouté. Cook the flour a minute before the liquid goes in.
Finishing the sauceThe butter, lemon juice and parsley go in at the very end with the pan off the heat, swirled until glossy. If the sauce boils after the butter is in, it breaks and turns greasy. Season only at this point — the reduced stock concentrates whatever salt was in it.
Pan juicesRanhofer has you build the sauce separately, but there is no reason to waste the fond in the sauté pan. Pour off the butter, sweat the shallots in that same pan, and the sauce picks up everything the birds left behind.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put this in The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, where pigeon and squab filled a chapter of their own — pigeon was a standard market bird in nineteenth-century America, both wild and, increasingly, raised in commercial squab lofts as the wild passenger pigeon collapsed. The name may be a tell: à l'impromptu is often read as marking the fast dish, though the reading sits awkwardly with the recipe's own reliance on a prepared house stock — the sauce is assembled from shallots, a splash of the day's white stock and wine, and butter in the time it takes the birds to color. Ranhofer's book is organized as a professional reference rather than a teaching manual, which is why the flour is "a little" and the stock is a cross-reference: the reader was assumed to be standing in a kitchen where both were already at hand.