Home › The World's Kitchen › Terrine of Squabs, Bonne Femme
Terrine of Squabs, Bonne Femme
Singe, draw, cut off heads and feet from six tender squabs, place on a tin and spread a teaspoon fat over each bird. Set in a brisk oven for fifteen minutes, or until of a nice colour all around, remove and cut them in halves. Finely mince a good-sized white onion, a green pepper and an ounce raw, lean ham; place these in an earthen cocotte dish with one light tablespoon butter and gently fry for five minutes, lightly stirring meanwhile. Add the squabs, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, add half pint uncooked fresh green peas, half pint broth and a gill demi-glace. Tie in a bunch two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one sprig thyme, one bay leaf, one clove, one bean garlic and add to the squabs. Mix lightly, tightly cover the pan and set in oven for one hour. Remove, lift up the bouquet and send to the table in same dish.
A straightforward pigeon braise dressed in Delmonico's French vocabulary. Most of the work is translation: the terms are period restaurant shorthand rather than difficult technique.
- SquabsYoung domestic pigeon, sold oven-ready at 12-16 oz each from game suppliers and many Asian markets. Modern birds arrive drawn and headless, so the singeing and drawing step is already done; just dry them well before the initial roast.
- Brisk oven425-450F. The fifteen minutes is a colouring step only, not cooking — you want browned skin and a still-rare interior before the braise.
- Cocotte and "terrine"A lidded earthenware or enamelled cast-iron casserole that can go from stovetop to oven to table. "Terrine" here names the vessel and the fact that the dish is served in it, not a forcemeat loaf.
- Gill and half pintA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz) of demi-glace. Half a pint is one cup of broth and one cup of shelled peas, measured by volume — about 5 oz of peas by weight.
- Demi-glaceClassically a brown sauce (espagnole) reduced with brown stock, thick enough to coat a spoon. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate works; failing that, reduce a cup of dark veal or beef stock to a quarter cup.
- The peasAn hour under a lid turns fresh green peas grey and floury. Hold them back and stir them in for the last ten minutes; frozen peas need five.
- An hour is for the legsSquab breast is at its best rosy, and this braise will take it well past that. Cook the full hour if you want the traditional falling-apart result, or pull the birds at 35-40 minutes for meat that still has some pink at the bone.
- Bouquet garniA "bean" of garlic is one clove of garlic; the single "clove" alongside it is the spice. Tie everything in cheesecloth or bind with kitchen string so the bay leaf and clove come out cleanly at the end.
- YieldSix birds, cut in halves, serve six as a main course with bread to take up the sauce.
Bonne femme — "good wife" — is French kitchen shorthand for a dish finished in a homely way, usually with vegetables and a light gravy. Its appearance in a book compiled from the Delmonico's tradition shows how thoroughly the grand American restaurants of the period worked in French categories: even the deliberately rustic preparations carry a French label. Squab was ordinary market poultry then in a way it no longer is, and the passenger pigeon, netted by the barrel earlier in the nineteenth century, is generally said to have been driven to the point of extinction around this time. The dish that resulted — browned birds, ham, onion, pepper, peas and a spoonful of demi-glace — is essentially a country braise given restaurant polish.