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Squabs En Casserole
Singe, cut the heads and feet off, draw and wipe neatly six fine, fat squabs. Arrange a thin slice of lard on the breast of each bird, tie them well around and lay them in a roasting pan. Sprinkle a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper over them. Pour at the bottom of the pan three tablespoons cold water and place in a hot oven to roast for twenty minutes, basting with their own gravy occasionally and turning them over once in a while. Remove, untie the strings, dress on a hot dish. Skim the fat off the gravy, add three chopped shallots, two tablespoons demi-glace, two tablespoons hot water. Boil the gravy in the pan on a brisk fire for five minutes. Pour the gravy over the birds. Arrange at each end of the dish one cluster of cooked green peas and on the other sides a cluster of glazed onions and serve.
A straightforward high-heat roast of six small birds with a quick pan sauce. The title is the only confusing part: in this period en casserole simply meant cooked in a covered pot or pan with its own gravy, and here the birds go into an open roasting pan.
- What a squab isA young domestic pigeon, killed before it flies, usually around 12 to 16 oz whole. Order from a game butcher or buy frozen; supermarket poultry has no substitute of the same size and richness.
- Singe, draw, wipeAll three steps are done for you now. Birds arrive plucked and eviscerated; check the cavity for stray lung tissue and pat dry. Dry skin is what gives the twenty-minute roast its colour.
- "A thin slice of lard"Not rendered lard from a tub. This is barding fat, a sheet of pork fatback or unsmoked salt pork laid over the breast and held with the trussing string. Thin-sliced pancetta or fatty streaky bacon works, though bacon adds smoke.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no number; a hot oven of this period is generally taken as roughly 425 to 450F. Squab wants fierce heat and a short stay; a moderate oven will dry the breast before the legs are done.
- The timing is the hingeTwenty minutes in a hot oven leaves the breast rosy, which is how squab is usually served today. Take it to about 135F at the thickest part of the breast. Roast it through to 165F as you would chicken and it turns livery and dry.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, sold frozen or in tubs by good grocers. Two tablespoons is a seasoning, not a sauce base; the pan juices, shallots and water do the rest. A concentrated dark chicken stock reduction is an acceptable stand-in.
- The pan sauceThree tablespoons of water in the bottom of the pan is there to keep the drippings from scorching, not to steam the birds. Top it up if it dries out before the twenty minutes are up. Five minutes of hard boiling with the shallots is enough to soften them and pull up the fond.
- Garnish and yieldPeas and glazed onions in separate clusters on one serving platter, which is how the dish was presented at table. One bird per person, so six servings; two birds each if the rest of the meal is light.
Squab was standard restaurant and club fare in the United States and France when this book was compiled, and it appears here presumably because roast pigeon was the sort of thing a competent professional cook was expected to know how to send out. Pigeons were kept in dovecotes for centuries precisely because squabs grow fast on food their parents forage and are ready to eat in about four weeks; American commercial squab farming grew up around the turn of the twentieth century and put the bird on hotel menus rather than only on farm tables. The finish here — barding fat, a spoonful of demi-glace, peas and glazed onions arranged in clusters — is classical French garnishing practice as codified in the professional kitchens of the same era, and the loose use of en casserole for anything served in its own gravy can be found in English-language cookbooks of the period.