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March 26
Menu: Pepper Cocktail; Fried Pigeons; Baked Onions; Mashed Potatoes; Celery and Nut Salad; Cheese Custards; Orange Ice Cream; Coffee Fried Pigeons-4 pigeons, 1/2 pound sausage meat, 1 egg, carrot, turnip, onion, celery, mace, and cloves. Empty and split pigeons in halves, lengthways; remove 1 joint of wing and of leg, and truss neatly; wash thoroughly. Put into a stewpan, a small bit turnip and carrot, small onion, bit of celery, blade of mace, few cloves and whole peppers; place pigeons on top; add 2 cups water, and all giblets of pigeons nicely cleaned and prepared; cover all with Criscoed paper and cover them with lid, and cook gently 1 hour. Remove pigeons from pan, and dry each thoroughly. Divide sausage into 4 portions; fill hollow of pigeons with these, and with floured hands pat it quite smooth, using flour all over pigeons. Have an egg well beaten; cover carefully with it, and roll in fine breadcrumbs. Put into hot Crisco, and fry a golden brown. Have the following sauce in dish, and place the pigeons neatly in center: Strain liquor pigeons were stewed in, and into pan put 1 tablespoon flour and 1 tablespoon Crisco, moisten it with a little cold water; then add to it the liquor, a 1/4 teaspoon meat extract, 1 small tomato chopped up, and salt to taste; let all boil for 10 minutes; then strain. It may require more stock or water to be added to make sauce a good consistency.
A two-stage dish: the birds are gently braised, then coated in sausage meat, breaded and fried, with a sauce built from the braising liquor. The hinge is drying the birds completely after stewing — sausage meat will not adhere to a wet, warm carcass, and wet breading slides off in the fat.
- The birdsThe recipe does not say what kind of pigeon; in 1913 these would have been table birds, squab or older tame pigeons, rather than anything caught wild. Four dressed squab of around 12-14 oz each will do; two Cornish hens split in half is a workable substitute, though the meat is milder and the braise can be shortened to about 40 minutes.
- "Criscoed paper"A greased round of parchment laid directly on the food — a cartouche — under the pan lid. Any parchment or foil brushed with oil does the same job of keeping the exposed breasts from drying.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble advertising cookbook, so Crisco appears in every recipe whether or not it needs to. Any neutral solid or liquid frying fat works; lard or a refined vegetable oil is closer in behaviour to 1913 Crisco than modern butter would be.
- Meat extractA quarter teaspoon of a concentrated beef extract such as Bovril, or a bouillon paste. It is there for colour and savour, so start at the low end and taste; modern pastes can be very salty.
- Blade of maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg; a whole "blade" is variously reckoned at anywhere from a pinch to about 1/2 teaspoon of ground mace, and the ground spice will cloud the stock and cannot be strained out.
- Frying temperatureFry at 360-375F. Any hotter and the crumb browns before the sausage layer, which is raw when it goes in, is cooked through.
- The sausage coatingHalf a pound divided among four birds is about 2 oz each, patted thin. Check that it reaches 160F at the thickest point; if it colours too fast, finish the birds in a 375F oven for a few minutes rather than pushing the fry.
- SauceTwo cups of water in a covered pan gives a modest amount of liquor, and the recipe itself allows that more stock or water may be needed. Whisk the flour and fat to a blond roux, slacken with cold water as directed, then add the strained liquor gradually; ten minutes of boiling is enough to cook out the flour.
- YieldFour servings, one bird each, with the sauce pooled in the dish rather than poured over — the point of the arrangement is to keep the fried crust crisp.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written to persuade American cooks to abandon lard and butter for a new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, and its "Calendar of Dinners" assigns a full menu to every day of the year — this one is dated March 27. The dish itself is older than the book and English in shape: braise-then-fry pigeon with a forcemeat coating and a brown sauce from the cooking liquor is a familiar Victorian cookery-school method. Pigeon was still a common enough meat in 1913 to appear on a weekday calendar; squab now sits at the luxury end of the market. The odd page title — "Coffee" — appears to be an artefact of the original menu layout, where the day's courses were listed in sequence and the recipes that followed were keyed to them.