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Squabs Saute, Sauce Finnoise
Cut off the necks and feet of six fresh squabs. Split open through the back and gently flatten with a cleaver while covered with a coarse towel. Season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Heat two tablespoons lard in a black frying pan, place the squabs in the pan, one beside another, and fry them for eight minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish, pour a hot Finnoise sauce over them and serve.
A plain sauté that depends almost entirely on the pan and on not crowding it. The sauce is a separate recipe elsewhere in the book, so read this as half a dish.
- Sauce Finnoise is not hereFilippini's recipes cross-reference his sauce chapter, and this one gives no formula at all. Locate the book's own sauce Finnoise before starting, or substitute a sauce you already know; without it you have six plain fried birds.
- "A black frying pan"Iron or steel rather than tinned copper. Use cast iron, well seasoned and preheated until the lard shimmers; the heavy pan matters here because six flattened birds will drop the temperature sharply.
- One pan will not hold six"One beside another" assumes a large hotel range pan. In a 12-inch skillet, cook two or three at a time and hold the finished ones uncovered in a 200F oven, or the skin steams instead of browning.
- Splitting and flatteningThis is spatchcocking: cut through the backbone, open the bird flat, and press with the flat of a cleaver through a folded towel so the breastbone cracks without shattering. The towel keeps splinters and skin damage down.
- Fat quantityTwo tablespoons of lard is scant for six birds. Use enough to film the pan generously and add more between batches; the rendered pigeon fat will help as you go.
- Timing and donenessSixteen minutes total suits a squab of around a pound. Modern practice usually pulls squab breast at 135-140F, distinctly rosy, since the meat turns dry and livery when taken further; USDA guidance for all poultry is 165F, so cook to whichever standard you keep.
- Buying squabSquab is a young domestic pigeon, sold fresh or frozen by game butchers and Asian markets, usually around a pound dressed. Necks and feet are generally already removed; the necks are worth saving for stock.
- YieldOne bird per person, so six servings. Serve on a heated dish, as directed, because squab cools very fast once flattened.
Squab appears throughout Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) because pigeon was a familiar item in hotel kitchens like the Delmonico's where Filippini worked, which treated the birds as a standard small roast or sauté. The names for countries and cities in this section, Finnoise among them, follow the nineteenth-century French kitchen habit of tagging a dish with a place name to signal a fixed set of accompaniments rather than any real connection to the region; the sauce is generally traced to that vocabulary rather than to Finnish cooking. What dates the recipe most is the equipment assumed: lard as the default frying fat, a cleaver and a coarse towel for flattening, and a black iron pan wide enough to hold six birds side by side over a coal range.