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Roast Squabs with Watercress
Cut off at the first joint the legs and necks of six fat, tender squabs. Singe; draw, neatly wipe and truss; lay a very thin slice larding pork on the breasts of the birds. Place in a roasting tin. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Pour two tablespoons cold water into the pan; then set in the oven to roast for eighteen minutes, turning over once in a while, at the same time basting with their own gravy. Remove, untruss and place on a large dish. Decorate with a little fresh watercress, skim the fat from the gravy, strain over the squabs and serve.
A short, high-heat roast of the sort restaurant kitchens turned out by the dozen. Almost everything hinges on the bird itself: squab is dark-meated and lean, and eighteen minutes is the whole cooking time.
- What a squab isA young domestic pigeon, slaughtered before it flies, sold at roughly 14 to 18 oz whole. Order from a butcher or a game supplier; supermarket poultry is no substitute, since the breast meat is dark, close-grained and behaves more like duck than chicken.
- Oven temperatureThe original names none. This timing only works in a hot oven, 450F, with the birds going in on a preheated pan; at 350F eighteen minutes leaves them raw and forty leaves them grey.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon for six birds, which is restrained by modern standards.
- Larding porkFresh pork fatback or unsmoked salt pork, sliced almost translucent and laid over the breast to keep it from drying. Thin-cut streaky bacon works, though it brings smoke the dish was not built around. Remove it for the last few minutes if you want colour on the skin.
- DonenessEighteen minutes at high heat brings the breast to about 135-140F, rosy at the bone, which is how squab is usually served today and why it is worth eating. Cooked to the 165F recommended for poultry it turns livery and dry. That trade-off is the reader's to make, and anyone avoiding undercooked poultry should choose another dish.
- The water in the panTwo tablespoons is most likely there to stop the drippings scorching in a fierce oven rather than to steam the birds. Check it partway through and add a splash more if the pan runs dry, or the gravy you strain over may taste scorched.
- The gravyWhat you get is a few spoonfuls of skimmed pan juices, not a sauce. Deglaze the tin with a little stock while it is still hot if you want enough to go round.
- YieldOne bird per person, six servings. The watercress is a garnish in the original but eats well as a salad under the birds, dressed with a little of the pan fat and vinegar.
Squab reached its height on American menus in exactly the era this book comes from. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book (1906) from the repertoire of a restaurant kitchen, and roast squab was a fixture of the middle courses there: small, expensive, quick to cook to order, and easily dressed up with nothing more than a bunch of watercress and its own juices. Pigeons had been eaten in Europe for centuries from dovecotes kept for the purpose, and in nineteenth-century America wild passenger pigeons were netted in enormous numbers before their collapse; the birds sold as squab by 1900 came instead from purpose-built lofts, a farmed trade that still supplies them. The watercress is not decoration alone — a peppery green served raw against rich roasted meat was a standard pairing of the period, seen equally beside roast beef and grilled chops.