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Squabs, New Yorkaise
Cut off heads and neatly draw six tender, fat squabs, dip feet in boiling water for one minute, remove skin from feet with a coarse towel and cut off nails. Season insides of birds with a half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper equally divided, place four small white grapes in each bird, neatly truss and lay on a roasting tin. Season with one teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, lightly baste with melted butter, set in brisk oven for thirty-five minutes, remove, untruss and keep hot. Finely chop a half pound raw lean veal with two ounces larding pork, place both in a mortar with two egg yolks, a bread panade, a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, pound the whole to a fine pulp and press it through sieve into a bowl. Add a half gill cream, sharply mix while adding, and with this force make nice border around a baking dish.
Prepare glazed chestnuts and place on top of border one beside another. Peel and thoroughly clean twelve fresh mushrooms, finely slice, place in a saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter and fry for five minutes. Add a finely sliced truffle, six tarragon leaves, a gill white wine, lightly mix and let reduce till almost dry. Pour in one and a half gills demi-glace, season with a saltspoon cayenne, lightly mix and boil for five minutes. Arrange squabs in centre of crown in baking dish, pour sauce over squabs and set in oven for fifteen minutes, basting once in a while, remove and serve in same dish.
A full-dress restaurant plate from the era when a garnished crown of forcemeat was the point of the dish. Everything except the roasting is make-ahead, and the timings on the birds are the one thing worth overruling.
- The hinge: do not roast the squabs 35 minutesSquab is dark meat and is treated like duck breast today, pulled at 130-140F in the thickest part of the breast, which takes about 15-20 minutes in a hot oven. The original then gives them a further 15 minutes in the sauce, so following it literally produces grey, dry birds. Roast short, then let the second stint in the oven finish them.
- Brisk oven425-450F. The final 15-minute glazing pass can be the same, or 400F if the forcemeat border is browning faster than you want.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon. A gill is 1/2 cup, so a half gill of cream is 1/4 cup and one and a half gills of demi-glace is about 3/4 cup.
- Squabs as sold nowFarmed squab usually arrives at 14-18 oz and already drawn, and most often headless and footless, so the whole business of scalding and skinning the feet is generally moot; head-on and foot-on birds are still sold in some markets. Six birds serve six as a course.
- Larding pork and panadeLarding pork is unsalted fresh back fat or fatback, not bacon or salt pork; if you substitute salt pork, cut the added salt sharply. A bread panade is crustless white bread soaked in milk and squeezed nearly dry; the recipe gives no quantity, so judge it by the forcemeat's stiffness.
- Mortar work, and keeping it coldA food processor replaces the mortar and sieve: pulse the chilled veal, fat, panade and yolks to a paste, then push through a fine sieve and beat in the cream over ice. If the mixture warms it breaks and will slump instead of holding a piped border. Pipe it with a plain or star tube around the rim of the dish.
- Demi-glaceMade in the period from veal stock and espagnole reduced by half. A well-reduced dark veal or chicken stock, or good commercial demi-glace, does the job; the sauce should coat a spoon.
- Glazed chestnuts and truffleGlazed chestnuts here are peeled chestnuts simmered in stock with butter and a little sugar until shiny, not the sweet French marrons. The truffle is a garnish of aroma rather than structure; a small quantity of good truffle or nothing at all is better than truffle oil.
- ServingAssemble in a dish you are willing to bring to the table, since the border cannot be moved once baked. One bird per person, half a breast at a time, with the mushroom sauce spooned over.
Squab is young domestic pigeon, taken from the nest before it has flown, which is why the flesh is tender and uniformly dark; pigeon houses were a standard feature of farms and estates for centuries before poultry breeding made chicken cheap and year-round. This recipe belongs to the grand hotel repertoire that Filippini and his contemporaries were codifying around 1900: a mousseline forcemeat piped into a crown, glazed chestnuts set around it, mushrooms and truffle reduced in white wine and bound with demi-glace. What the suffix "New Yorkaise" commemorates is not clear, though American hotel kitchens of the period cheerfully invented French-styled names for their own creations. The grapes tucked inside each bird are the older European habit of roasting small game with fruit in the cavity, which perfumes the meat as it cooks and was often said to keep it moist.