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Squabs, Valencienne
Cut off the heads and feet from six fresh, fat squabs. Draw, wipe and truss. Heat a tablespoon butter in a braizing pan, add one finely chopped onion and one chopped green pepper; cook for five minutes. Nicely arrange the squabs, one beside another, in the pan. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika and a saltspoon Spanish saffron. Moisten with a pint broth or hot water and one gill tomato sauce; as soon as it comes to a boil add three ounces raw rice, two Spanish sweet peppers cut in small squares, two artichoke bottoms and three tablespoons cooked green peas; lightly mix, cover the pan and boil for five minutes, then set in the oven for forty minutes. Remove, untruss the squabs, arrange the rice on a hot dish, dome-like, place the squabs around the rice and serve.
A paella-adjacent braise built for a hotel range, written when squab was standard butcher stock. Most of the adaptation is arithmetic and one judgment call about doneness.
- SquabsSquab is young domestic pigeon, sold frozen at game and specialty butchers at roughly 12 to 16 oz each. Six of them serve six people generously; poussin or Cornish hen of similar weight behaves much the same in the pan, though the meat is paler and milder.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, which for saffron means a generous pinch of threads rather than a measured spoonful. Three ounces of raw rice is a scant half cup.
- The vesselA "braizing pan" here is a wide, shallow, lidded pan that goes from burner to oven: a large braiser, deep sauté pan with lid, or a Dutch oven. The birds must sit in one layer, side by side, or the rice cooks unevenly.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. 350F is a reasonable modern default and suits the forty-minute figure.
- Rice to liquidTwo and a half cups of liquid to half a cup of rice is far more than rice absorbs. This is deliberate: the birds and vegetables drink some, the rest reduces, and the result is meant to mound on the platter rather than run. If it looks soupy at the forty-minute mark, uncover for the last few minutes.
- Doneness, the real decisionForty minutes at 350F will take squab breast well past the medium-rare that modern cooks prize; the meat goes grey and livery. Pull the birds at an internal 140 to 145F in the thigh, tent them, and return the pan to the oven alone if the rice needs longer.
- Spanish sweet peppers and artichoke bottomsJarred piquillo or pimiento peppers are the closest stand-ins for the former, though piquillos are smokier. Artichoke bottoms are sold canned or frozen; drained quartered hearts work, added with the rice so they hold shape.
- TrussingTrussing keeps the legs against the body so the birds sit flat and cook evenly in a crowded pan. A single loop of kitchen twine around the legs is enough, and the recipe is right to have you cut it before serving.
"Valencienne" on a turn-of-the-century menu means à la valencienne, in the style of Valencia, which in French professional kitchens was shorthand for rice cooked with saffron, sweet peppers, tomato and whatever meat was at hand. It is paella filtered through the escoffier-era brigade: the same saffron and pimiento, but braised under a lid in a covered pan and served domed on a platter rather than eaten from the wide flat pan that gives paella its name. Squab was an unremarkable choice at the time; pigeon lofts supplied American and European markets in quantity, and young birds were quick-cooking. Their near-disappearance from ordinary butcher counters over the twentieth century, as commercial broiler chicken took over, is one reason this dish now reads as luxurious.