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Squabs En Casserole, Leopold
Cut heads and feet from six nice, fat, young squabs, draw, truss, save livers and hearts. Place squabs in roasting pan, sprinkle a teaspoon salt over, lightly baste with a little melted butter, then set to roast in a brisk oven for twenty minutes, remove, untruss and place them in an earthen casserole. Cut two ounces very lean raw bacon into quarter-inch-square pieces, place in frying pan with teaspoon melted butter and fry till a nice golden colour, tossing once in a while. Lift up with skimmer, drain on a cloth and add to squabs. Place six small, peeled onions in bacon pan, fry for eight minutes or until a nice brown colour all around, and add to squabs with half pint fresh, shelled (or French) peas. Cut a medium truffle and four peeled, fresh mushrooms in small square pieces, add to squabs, season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Pick leaves off a branch chervil, branch parsley, and sprinkle over all. Pour in a half gill sherry, gill good white wine and half gill demi-glace. Shuffle the casserole well and place lid on. Make a dough with a little flour and water, roll it out on a table in rope-like shape, then adjust it around edges to prevent evaporation, cover casserole, set in oven for fifty minutes, remove and send to table without uncovering.
A hotel-style braise that starts in a hot oven and finishes sealed under a flour-and-water rope. Most of what needs translating here is vocabulary and vessels rather than technique.
- The hinge: the luting pasteThe dough rope is not decoration — it seals the lid so the wine and stock reduce into the birds instead of evaporating. Use a stiff paste of flour and water, press it firmly into the gap between rim and lid, and break the seal only at the table.
- "Casserole" here means the potAn earthen casserole is a lidded earthenware or stoneware braiser, not a baked dish. A heavy Dutch oven with a well-fitting lid does the same job; anything with a loose lid will need more paste.
- Oven temperaturesA brisk oven for the initial roast is roughly 400-425F. The original gives no temperature for the fifty-minute sealed braise; a moderate oven, around 325-350F, suits that stage, since the point is a slow exchange of liquid, not further browning.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup: 1/4 cup sherry, 1/2 cup white wine, 1/4 cup demi-glace. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, making three saltspoons roughly 3/4 teaspoon pepper — assertive but not a misprint.
- SquabsSquab is a young domestic pigeon, generally around a pound each, sold dressed by game butchers and some Asian markets. The recipe gives no yield, but six birds suggests six servings, one each. Cornish hens are a common stand-in, though they are leaner and blander.
- Demi-glaceIn the classical kitchen, espagnole sauce combined with brown stock and reduced. Commercial demi-glace concentrate works; plain reduced veal or beef stock is acceptable if you reduce it until it is syrupy, since the dish depends on that body.
- The livers and heartsThe recipe tells you to save them and then never uses them. Chop and fold them into the pot with the bacon, or fry them separately as a cook's portion.
- Peas and truffleHalf a pint of shelled peas is a cup, nearer 5 oz by weight, and 'French peas' probably indicates small young petits pois. Frozen petits pois added at the start will be soft after fifty minutes sealed; add them in the last fifteen minutes if you want them green. A fresh black truffle is optional in practice — a teaspoon of chopped preserved truffle or a few dried porcini rehydrated give a closer effect than truffle oil.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, and it carries two hallmarks of the professional American kitchens Filippini worked in: a personal name attached to a garnish, and an ingredient list that assumes a truffle is always in the larder. Dishes labelled with a name — Leopold, Rachel — were a standard way a professional kitchen catalogued a fixed combination of garnishes, and the person behind such a name was often a patron or a colleague; who Leopold was is not documented here. Squab was a familiar restaurant bird in the period, since pigeons were raised in quantity and reach eating weight before they ever fly. The sealed casserole belongs to an older tradition of cooking en daube or en terrine, where a flour-and-water luting paste stood in for a gasketed lid; the theatrical part — sending the pot to the table unopened so the diners get the first rush of steam — likely helps explain why the technique survived into restaurant service after tighter cookware made it unnecessary.