Pigeon Broth
(Boulogne.) Lard and roast 4 fine pigeons, cut up the meat and put the bones and gravy in 1 quart of stock to cook. Chop the meat, with one onion, 1 pound of bread-crumbs soaked in milk, and 1 ounce of butter. Add to the rest and cook 1 hour. Press through a sieve, add 1 tablespoonful of port or sherry, salt, pepper, and some slices of toasted bread.
A roast-then-purée soup of the old French style, closer to a thick potage than a broth despite the name. The two things to watch are the bread and the birds.
- The bread is the hingeA full pound of crumbs soaked in milk against a single quart of stock gives something nearer a pudding than a soup. Start with 4-6 oz of crumbs, thin with additional stock after sieving, and add more bread only if you want it heavier.
- PigeonsThese are domestic squab, roughly 12-16 oz each, sold at good butchers and by mail order. Four is a lot of expensive bird for one pot; two squab plus extra stock, or four Cornish hens, gives a comparable result. Wild pigeon is leaner and stronger and needs longer in the stock.
- LardingThreading strips of pork fat through the flesh with a larding needle. Squab is lean enough to want it, but wrapping the breasts in bacon or sheets of pork fatback (barding) does the same job with less trouble.
- Roasting the birdsRoast hot and briefly, 450F for 15-20 minutes, so the meat is still rosy. It is going into stock for an hour afterwards and long roasting first leaves it dry and stringy.
- Saving the gravy"Gravy" here means the roasting-pan juices, not a thickened sauce. Deglaze the pan with a little of the stock and scrape everything in.
- Press through a sieveA food mill or a blender followed by a fine sieve. Pull the bones out first; the point of the sieving is to catch skin, sinew and any bone splinters, so do not skip the final strain.
- The wineA single tablespoon of port or sherry into a quart is a seasoning, not a flavour base. Add it off the heat at the end so it does not cook flat.
- Yield and servingAbout six small servings as a first course. The toasted bread goes in the bowl, not the pot, or it dissolves into the purée.
"With a Saucepan Over the Sea" collected dishes from European kitchens for American readers, and the parenthetical "(Boulogne.)" is doing the work of a byline: this is presented as what a cook in that Channel port would make. The recipe belongs to a long French tradition of potages built on roast bird, pounded to a paste with milk-soaked bread and pushed through a sieve — the ancestor of the modern purée soup, from the era before blenders when a fine sieve and a wooden pestle were the only way to get smoothness. Pigeon is often said to have been a more workaday meat than it is now, though its status varied: in France the colombier was frequently a seigneurial privilege rather than a fixture of ordinary farms, and squab production was strongly seasonal. The decline of domestic pigeon-keeping in the twentieth century is generally credited with pushing the bird toward restaurant food, though it is unlikely to be the whole story. The pound of breadcrumbs is a reminder that bread was the ordinary thickener of the period, cheaper than cream and used freely to stretch a small amount of meat across a table.