Home › The World's Kitchen › Squabs, En Cocotte, with Fresh Peas
Squabs, En Cocotte, with Fresh Peas
Cut of heads and legs from six fresh squabs, draw and truss. Place on a tin, baste each with a little melted butter, then set in a brisk oven ten minutes. Remove and place in an earthen cocotte dish, add three-quarters pint shelled peas, from Monday, one ounce raw lean ham cut in quarter-inch-square pieces and twelve small onions previously browned in a teaspoon of butter. Season with a teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, moisten with one gill broth and one gill tomato juice. Knead a teaspoon butter with a teaspoon flour and divide in small bits over all. Tie in a bunch one branch parsley, one branch chervil, half a bean garlic and add to the squabs. Tightly cover, then set in oven forty-five minutes. Remove and send to the table without uncovering.
A braise dressed up as a roast: the birds are seared hot and fast, then shut in a sealed pot with peas, ham and onions so they finish in their own steam. Almost everything that needs translating here is a unit, a vessel or a bird you no longer see whole at the butcher.
- SquabA squab is a young domestic pigeon, killed before it flies, and dresses out at about 12-16 oz. Specialty butchers and Asian markets still carry them frozen; Cornish game hens of similar weight are the usual stand-in, though the meat is paler and milder.
- Draw and trussBirds now arrive drawn. Trussing still matters in this dish: legs tied close keeps six birds sitting upright and tight in one pot so they steam evenly rather than sprawling.
- Brisk oven425-450F for the initial ten minutes. The point is color on the skin, not cooking. The covered stage that follows is better at 350F, since a sealed pot at high heat will boil the liquid away and toughen the breasts.
- The cocotteAn earthenware or enameled cast-iron lidded pot just large enough to hold the birds in one layer. The lid must genuinely seal; there is only a cup of liquid in total and it is meant to become steam. Luting a rim with flour-and-water paste was a known technique for sealed pots, though this recipe asks only that the dish be tightly covered.
- Gill, saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so one gill broth plus one gill tomato juice is one cup of liquid altogether. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the pepper about three-quarters of a teaspoon, which is assertive but not wrong for six birds.
- "Peas, from Monday"A cross-reference, not an ingredient; the book appears to send you back to peas prepared for an earlier day's menu. Read it as three-quarters of a pint of shelled fresh peas, about 1 1/2 cups shelled, or roughly 1 1/2 lb in the pod; frozen peas should go in only for the last ten minutes or they will collapse.
- Half a bean garlicHalf a clove, tied into the herb bundle with the parsley and chervil; since the pot goes to the table still covered, the bundle stays in it. Chervil is worth seeking out for its anise note; flat parsley with a few tarragon leaves is the closest substitute.
- Beurre manieThe kneaded butter and flour, dotted over the top as the recipe directs, thickens the small amount of liquid into a glaze as the pot cooks.
- Timing and donenessForty-five minutes covered brings squab well past the pink breast that restaurants now favor, which is the intent of a braise. Check the thigh reaches 165F; if the birds are closer to Cornish hen size, begin checking at thirty-five minutes.
- ServingOne bird per person, six servings. The instruction to send it up covered is the whole theatrical point: the pot is opened at the table so the trapped steam of ham, garlic and chervil arrives with the food.
The International Cook Book belongs to Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and a recipe in it can casually tell you to fetch the peas "from Monday." Squab was a fixture of American hotel and club cooking from the 1880s onward, cheap enough to be an everyday bird and elegant enough to headline a dinner, and it has only become a luxury item since. En cocotte simply names the vessel: a small lidded earthenware pot in which food both cooks and travels to the table, a French domestic habit that carried into grand-hotel service precisely because the sealed lid preserved the aroma across a long walk from kitchen to dining room. The pairing with fresh peas, ham and glazed baby onions is the standard spring garnish of the period, close kin to the French pigeons aux petits pois that appears in nineteenth-century manuals.