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Pigeon Pie
Mrs. L.
Make a fine puff paste; lay a border of it around a large dish, and cover the bottom with a veal cutlet, or a very tender steak free from fat and bone; season with salt, cayenne pepper, and mace. Prepare as many pigeons as can be put in one layer of the dish; put in each pigeon a small lump of butter, and season with pepper and salt; lay them in the dish breast downwards, and cut in slices a half dozen of hard boiled eggs, and lay in with the birds; put in more butter, some veal broth, and cover the whole with crust. Bake slowly for an hour and a half.
A Victorian raised meat pie of the English type, built on a bed of veal or steak with whole birds laid over it. Everything here is workable today with squab from a butcher; the main adjustments are the oven and the birds themselves.
- The birds"Pigeons" here means young domestic squab, around a pound each dressed, sold by good butchers and Asian markets. Doves and some wild pigeons are game birds subject to hunting regulation, so check local rules; older wild birds are also far tougher than the hour and a half assumes. About four squab should fill a large deep dish in one layer.
- Slow ovenA "slow" oven in this period is usually read as about 300-325F. That is right for the filling but leaves puff paste pale and heavy, so one option is to start at 425F for 15 minutes to set and lift the crust, then drop to 325F for the remainder.
- Doneness, not the clockNinety minutes at a low heat is a reasonable estimate for whole squab packed in liquid, but check with a thermometer in the thigh of a bird: 165F. The veal or steak beneath will be well past that and should be, since it is there to enrich the gravy.
- The paste borderThe border laid around the rim is not decoration. It gives the lid something to seal against and stops it sliding into the gravy as the filling settles. Cut a vent in the centre or the steam will lift the whole top.
- Veal brothAdd only enough to come partway up the birds, about a cup for a large dish. Filled to the top it boils up under the lid and turns the crust to paste. A good chicken stock stands in perfectly well.
- Mace and cayenneMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself; ground mace is still sold and a quarter teaspoon is enough for the whole dish. The strength of nineteenth-century cayenne was unstandardised and hard to compare with a modern bottle, so start with a pinch.
- Breast downwardsLaying the birds breast down keeps the leanest meat submerged in butter and broth, which matters because squab breast dries quickly. Do not turn them partway through.
- Carving and yieldThe birds go in whole and bone-in, so this is a pie that is served in portions of one bird each rather than spooned out. Four squab serve four generously with the veal and eggs beneath.
Pigeon pie came to American cookbooks straight from English country practice, where a dovecote was a standard feature of a manor or farm and supplied young birds through the winter and early spring, when other fresh meat was scarce. The layer of veal cutlet or steak under the birds is the traditional English construction: pigeon is lean and gives little of its own richness, so the beef or veal, the butter and the hard-boiled eggs all exist to supply fat and body to the gravy. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by local women, which is why this recipe carries the tag "Mrs. L." rather than a formal heading. That the wild passenger pigeon that once glutted American markets was gone entirely by 1914 is a large part of why the dish now reads as antique.