Pigeons
Pigeons both wild and domesticated are now abundant. Clean and truss a number, without stuffing. Arrange them in a pan, dust well with pepper and lay a thin slice of salt pork on each. Bake in a hot oven for forty-five minutes, basting twice with butter and water and serve garnished with peppers stuffed with chopped ham and seasoned bread crumbs.
A bare-bones roasting formula that assumes a cook who has handled birds before. The main thing to correct is the timing, which was written for tough wild birds rather than the tender farmed squab most people will buy.
- Hot ovenA hot oven is generally taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F. That is right for small birds, which want fast heat and a short stay.
- Forty-five minutes is too longA modern squab of 12-16 oz is done at 20-25 minutes in a 450F oven, the breast pink and the juices running rose. Forty-five minutes turns it grey, dry and livery. Older or wild birds are a different proposition: they are genuinely tough and are better braised in stock, covered, for an hour or more than roasted.
- What to buySquab, sold by good butchers and by mail, is the domesticated pigeon of this recipe: a young bird, never flown, killed at about four weeks. One bird per person is the standard serving. Doves and band-tailed pigeons are migratory game and may be taken only under licence and in season; feral pigeons are usually unprotected, but check the rules where you live.
- The salt porkThe slice on the breast is barding, not seasoning. Pigeon has almost no fat of its own and the breast dries before the legs cook. A thin sheet of fatback, unsmoked bacon or a smear of butter under a foil cap does the same work; remove it for the last five minutes to let the skin colour.
- Basting with butter and waterThe water most likely keeps the butter and pan drippings from scorching in a hot oven over a long roast. With a short roast you can skip it and simply spoon fat over the birds once, halfway through.
- Trussing, and why no stuffingThe recipe leaves the cavity empty. Tie the legs together and pin the wings so the bird holds its shape and cooks evenly.
- The garnish is a separate dishThe stuffed peppers need their own cooking. Small sweet peppers filled with chopped ham and seasoned crumbs want about 25-30 minutes at 375F, so start them before the birds go in.
- Resting and carvingLet the birds sit five to eight minutes before serving. Squab is usually eaten with the fingers for the legs; the breast comes off cleanly with a knife along the keel.
The confident opening line — pigeons "both wild and domesticated are now abundant" — is worth pausing over. The passenger pigeon, once the most numerous bird in North America and a staple of cheap American cookery through the nineteenth century, was hunted and netted to commercial extinction; the last known individual died in captivity in 1914. What kept pigeon on the table afterwards was the domestic side of that sentence: commercial squab raising expanded sharply around the turn of the century, with lofts supplying hotels and restaurants a small, tender, uniformly sized bird that needed nothing but a fast oven and a slice of pork fat. The barding with salt pork and the basting are the old treatment for a lean wild bird, carried over onto a bird that no longer strictly needed it.