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September 13
Menu: Clam Cocktails; Stewed Squabs; Potato Balls; Grape Jelly; Green Corn; Watermelon Frappe Coffee Stewed Squabs-Cut 2 squabs into neat joints. Put 1 cup water in saucepan when it boils lay in squabs, 1 sliced onion, and 1 slice of carrot, simmer for 1½ hours. Blend 2 tablespoons Crisco with 2 tablespoons flour, add 1 cup stock from squabs, salt and pepper to taste and boil for 5 minutes stirring all the time. Arrange the squabs on a hot dish and strain over the sauce.
A short braise from the dinner-calendar section of a Crisco promotional cookbook. The method is sound; most of what needs saying concerns the bird itself and the very small amount of liquid.
- What a squab isA young domestic pigeon, four weeks old or less, weighing about 12-16 oz whole. It is dark-fleshed and tender but has almost no fat. Butchers who handle game birds and many Asian markets carry them frozen; two squabs serve two people as a main course.
- One cup of water is not muchWith the birds jointed and packed into a small heavy saucepan the liquid will come only part way up, so this behaves more like a braise than a poach. The recipe specifies neither pan size nor a lid; use a pan just large enough, keep the lid on, and check once or twice that it has not gone dry.
- Simmer means barely movingAn hour and a half at a true boil will shred the meat and cloud the stock. Hold it at the point where a bubble breaks every second or two. Jointed squab is usually tender well before the full time, so start testing at 45 minutes.
- Crisco and the rouxCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, launched in 1911 and the reason this book exists. Butter, a neutral oil or modern all-vegetable shortening all work here in the same quantity. Cook the flour and fat together a minute before adding stock or the sauce tastes raw.
- Get a cup of stock out of itReduction over 90 minutes may leave you short. Strain what you have, top up with chicken stock rather than water if needed, and add it to the roux off the heat in stages to keep it smooth.
- Five minutes of boiling is rightThis is the one timing not to shorten. A flour-thickened sauce needs a few minutes at a boil, stirred, to lose its pastiness and reach full thickening power.
- SeasoningThe original salts only at the sauce stage. Season the birds before they go in as well; the meat is dense and takes salt poorly at the end.
- ServingWarm the platter, as instructed - squab cools fast. Rice, mashed potato or toast points catch the sauce, and the strained-out onion and carrot are discarded rather than served.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: a shelf-stable, hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening introduced in 1911 as a substitute for lard and butter. The book's "Calendar of Dinners" supplied a year of menus, which is why this page runs a recipe straight into the following day's oysters and porterhouse steak. Squab appears here without explanation because it needed none - pigeons were raised commercially and in backyard lofts across the United States, and a pair of squabs seems to have been a reasonably accessible main course, though squab also turned up in the same years as a hotel and restaurant delicacy. The recipe's shape, a long gentle braise finished with a flour-and-fat sauce made from the cooking liquor, is standard nineteenth-century practice; the only new thing about it in 1913 was the two tablespoons of Crisco doing work that lard or butter had always done.