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To Stew Birds
Mrs. Jas. Beaty.
Wash and stuff them with bread crumbs, seasoned with pepper, salt, butter or chopped salt pork, and fasten them tight. Line a stew pan with slices of bacon, add a quart of water and a bit of butter the size of a goose egg, or else four slices of salt pork. Add if you like sliced onions, and sweet herbs and mace. Stew till tender, then take them up and strain the gravy over them. Add boiling water if the liquor is too much reduced.
A braise, not a stew in the modern sense: the birds sit on a bed of bacon in barely a quart of liquid and are lifted out before the cooking liquor is reduced to a sauce. The whole thing hinges on the size of the bird, which the recipe declines to name.
- Which birdsThe recipe never says. In an 1877 Canadian household book "birds" would likely have covered whatever small game came to hand — pigeon, quail, snipe, and possibly songbirds that are now protected under migratory bird law. Buy farmed quail, squab or poussin instead; the method is the same and the timing below assumes them.
- Butter the size of a goose eggA goose egg runs roughly three times a hen's egg, so this is somewhere between 4 and 6 oz — call it half to three-quarters of a cup. It is a genuinely loose measure, and the alternative offered (four slices of salt pork) tells you the point is fat and salt, not precision.
- Sweet herbsThe period shorthand for parsley, thyme, marjoram and savory, usually tied in a bundle and pulled out before serving. A modern bouquet garni does the job.
- MaceThe outer covering of the nutmeg, warmer and less sharp than the seed. Ground mace is still sold; a blade or two of whole mace in the pan is closer to what was meant, and easier to remove.
- Stew till tenderQuail need 20 to 25 minutes at a bare simmer, squab and poussin 30 to 40. Farmed birds are not the tough wild ones this recipe anticipates, and an hour will leave the breast dry and stringy even in liquid. Older wild pigeon genuinely does want the longer time.
- The stuffingBread stuffing inside a bird cooked at simmering temperature may lag well behind the meat; it should reach 165F. Pack the crumbs lightly, or bake the stuffing separately and serve it under the birds.
- Straining the gravyStrain, then reduce hard for a few minutes before it goes over the birds — a quart of water plus rendered bacon and butter will otherwise be thin and greasy. Skim the fat off the top first.
- YieldOne squab or poussin, or two quail, per person. A quart of liquid and a pan lined with bacon will handle four to six small birds at once.
The Home Cook Book was compiled "by ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and published in 1877, with proceeds going to the Hospital for Sick Children — one of the earliest and most successful Canadian community cookbooks, and the model for hundreds of church and charity compilations that followed. Its recipes are credited by contributor name; "Mrs. Jas. Beaty" may connect her to the prominent Toronto Beaty family of publishers and politicians, though the identification is not certain. The vagueness of "birds" is itself informative: game was still domestic supply rather than a purchase, and a cook was expected to adapt one method to whatever came into the kitchen, from a brace of pigeons to a dozen small birds. Lining the pan with bacon and finishing with a strained liquor belongs to the older English tradition of stewing tough game in a covered vessel, a technique that survived in home books long after ranges improved.