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Squabs, Piquante Sauce
Singe and cut off the legs at the first joints, remove the heads, split open through the back, neatly draw and wipe dry six nice fat Philadelphia squabs. Remove the breast bones and lightly flatten with a cleaver. Place them on a dish, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, well divided all over.
Heat two tablespoons melted lard in a large frying pan, lay in the squabs one beside another, and gently fry them for eight minutes on each side. Remove; pour a hot piquante sauce, on a hot dish. Dress the squabs over the sauce, one overlapping another, and send to the table.
A straightforward pan-fry of flattened squab, with all the flavour work pushed onto a sauce the recipe assumes you already have simmering. Sort out the sauce first, because the birds take only a quarter of an hour and must go to the table hot.
- What a squab isA squab is a young pigeon, four weeks old or less, that has never flown; the meat is dark, tender and closer to duck breast than to chicken. Order from a game butcher or online supplier, dressed and drawn, which removes most of the labour in the first sentence. Figure 12-16 oz per bird, one bird per person.
- "Philadelphia squabs"A period market term rather than a breed, generally taken to mean plump, well-finished birds associated with the Pennsylvania trade. Any well-finished squab will do; avoid anything sold simply as "pigeon," which may be an older bird that wants braising instead.
- Splitting through the backThis is spatchcocking. Cut down either side of the backbone, open the bird out, lift away the keel and rib bones, then press flat with the heel of your hand or a cleaver so the whole underside meets the pan. Even thickness is the point of the exercise.
- Fat and pan spaceTwo tablespoons of lard will not carry six flattened squab; use four to six, or clarified butter, and work in two batches in a 12-inch pan. Crowded birds steam rather than brown, and the browned skin is most of what this dish is.
- Timing and donenessEight minutes a side over moderate heat gives a squab breast cooked through and firm. Squab is often served pink in modern restaurant kitchens, pulled at around 135-140F in the breast, which is nearer five to six minutes skin-side and three or four on the second side; note that this is below the 165F usually advised for poultry. Following the original will give a fully cooked, drier, more old-fashioned result.
- The piquante sauceNot given here; the recipe assumes you have it, presumably from elsewhere in the book. Classically it is a brown sauce (espagnole or demi-glace) finished with shallots and vinegar reduced together, then chopped gherkins and herbs off the heat. Do not boil it once the gherkins go in, and keep it hot in a bain-marie while the birds fry.
- AssemblyThe sauce goes under the birds, not over them, so the skin stays crisp. Warm the platter well; flattened squab loses heat fast.
Squab was a fixture of American hotel and restaurant cooking from the 1880s through the 1920s, and "Philadelphia squab" appeared on menus as a mark of quality, much like Long Island duckling. Sauce piquante belongs to the classical French repertoire -- a demi-glace sharpened with a shallot-and-vinegar reduction and cut with gherkins -- and its acidity was a conventional foil for rich, dark little birds. The pairing shows what a book called The International Cook Book was for in 1906: an American market bird dressed in French sauce, written for a cook expected to have brown sauce already on the stove.