No. 2015

Squabs, New York Style

Pigeonneaux a la New Yorkaise

Have some squabs drawn, singed, cleaned, and trussed for an entree (No. 178); fry them white in butter and dredge over a little flour; fry for a few moments longer without browning, then moisten with beef stock (No. 194a); add a bunch of parsley garnished with thyme and bay leaf, small onions, potato balls made five-eighths of an inch in circumference, and small half inch dice of bacon fried in butter. A few moments before serving, add some quenelles shaped to represent large verdal olives either of godiveau or else of chicken quenelle forcemeat (No. 89), into which mingle chopped sweetbreads and parsley; poach these in boiling water. Just when ready to serve, remove the parsley, thicken the stew with raw egg-yolks diluted with cream, and incorporate a piece of fresh butter, and dress the squabs in the middle of a dish with the garnishing around.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's braise from Ranhofer's The Epicurean, written for a kitchen where stock, forcemeat and trussed birds were already standing by. Read it as a fricassee of squab finished with an egg-and-cream liaison.

The liaison is the hingeOnce the raw yolks diluted with cream go in, the sauce must not reach a simmer or the yolks curdle. Pull the pan from the heat, temper the yolk mixture with a ladle of the hot cooking liquid, then return it and stir over the barest heat until it coats a spoon.
"Fry them white"This means cooking the birds in butter over moderate heat until the flesh is set and opaque with no colour at all — closer to sweating than searing. Browning would darken the finished dish rather than keeping it pale, which is the point of a white stew.
SquabsA squab is a young pigeon that has never flown, roughly 12–16 oz dressed. Order from a game butcher or a Chinese or Middle Eastern market; poussin or Cornish hen of the same weight behaves similarly in the pan, though the flavour is far milder. Figure one bird per person; the recipe itself specifies no number, calling only for "some squabs."
The potato balls"Five-eighths of an inch in circumference" would give a ball under a quarter inch across, which no one could turn by hand. Ranhofer more likely means diameter; cut marble-sized balls with the small end of a parisienne scoop and add them with enough time to cook through, about 12–15 minutes in the braising liquid.
Cross-referencesThe numbers point elsewhere in the book: No. 178 is the entrée trussing, No. 194a the beef stock, No. 89 the chicken quenelle forcemeat. Any well-made brown or light beef stock will serve; for the quenelles, a food processor purée of chicken breast, egg white and cream, seasoned and bound, does the work that godiveau did by mortar.
Verdal olivesA large green French table olive, named for shape and size only — no olives go into the dish. The quenelle forcemeat, mixed with chopped poached sweetbread and parsley, is moulded between two spoons into ovals of about that size and poached in barely boiling water for a few minutes until firm.
Bacon and the bouquetThe half-inch bacon dice should be blanched or fried and drained before joining the stew; unsmoked pancetta or salt pork is probably closer to the period product than modern heavily smoked bacon. The parsley bundle with thyme and bay is a bouquet garni and is lifted out before the sauce is finished.
Braising timeBarely covered in stock at a bare simmer, the birds are tender in 25–35 minutes. Squab is dry and livery when overcooked, so test the thigh early rather than trusting a fixed time.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's for most of three decades and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of what that kitchen did — some 3,500 numbered recipes, cross-referenced like an encyclopedia because they were written for cooks working inside a brigade rather than for home use. The "New York style" label is Ranhofer's own habit of naming French preparations after the city and its patrons, much as he attached names like Newburg or Delmonico to other dishes; there is nothing regionally American in the technique, which is a classic white fricassee finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Squab was ordinary market poultry in nineteenth-century New York, raised commercially and common enough that pigeons fill an entire section of the book.