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Pigeon Pie
(England.) Cut 2 pigeons, after cleaning them, into four pieces, each; cut into pieces 1 inch square 1/2 pound of beef tenderloin, season with salt, pepper, parsley and chopped onion, arrange the meat in a dish, and cover with 1 cup of stock, then a layer of sliced hard-boiled eggs, and a layer of bacon. Sprinkle a little flour over each piece of meat before putting in. Add a tablespoonful of walnut catchup to the stock, and cover all with a thin puff paste, brushed with the yolk of an egg, to glaze it. Bake in a good oven 1 1/2 hours, serve hot or cold.
A raised-flavour English game pie with only a top crust, built cold in the dish and baked long enough to soften the birds' legs. Two decisions matter: getting real birds, and protecting the pastry over a ninety-minute bake.
- The birds"Pigeon" here would have meant either dovecote squab or wild pigeon; squab, sold by butchers and some Asian markets at roughly 12-16 oz each, is the usual modern buy, and two make the pie. Quartering leaves bone in, which helps give the gravy body, so don't be tempted to bone them out.
- A good ovenProbably in the region of 375-400F, though the book gives no figure. Puff pastry needs a brisk heat to rise, and it may well be dark brown before the pigeon legs are tender, so lay a sheet of foil loosely over the crust once it has coloured.
- Walnut catchupA Victorian condiment of green walnuts, vinegar, anchovy and spice, still made by a few British firms. Mushroom ketchup is the closest substitute; a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce plus a teaspoon of soy will stand in.
- Puff pasteAll-butter frozen puff pastry is a fair trade for homemade; the recipe asks for it thin, so roll it out accordingly. Cut a vent in the centre or the steam from the cup of stock will lift the lid off its seal.
- Assembly orderThe layering given is deliberate: floured meat and stock at the bottom, sliced hard-boiled egg above it, bacon on top. The bacon bastes the filling as it renders, and the eggs stay whole rather than dissolving into the gravy.
- Stock levelOne cup will not cover the meat in a modern deep pie dish, and it is not meant to. Use a dish the filling nearly fills, so the liquid comes about two-thirds up; a wide, shallow dish leaves the top layer dry.
- Beef tenderloinAn expensive cut for a long bake. Chuck or skirt cut into 1-inch pieces suits the timing better and gives more flavour, though it wants the full 1 1/2 hours.
- Yield and servingServes 4. Served cold, as the recipe allows, the stock sets to a light jelly; chill it in the baking dish overnight rather than turning it out.
Pigeon pie belongs to the long English tradition of the dovecote, where squabs were taken young from the nest -- often said to have supplied fresh meat in months when little else was killed, though this is more tradition than documented practice, since squabs are chiefly a spring-to-autumn crop. By the time this book was written the pie had become a country-house and picnic dish, valued precisely because it eats as well cold as hot, the gravy setting to a jelly as it cools. The walnut catchup dates the recipe as clearly as anything in it: bottled walnut and mushroom ketchups were standard British store-cupboard seasonings through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doing the umami work that Worcestershire sauce and stock cubes later took over. The book's habit of labelling each dish with a country, here "(England.)," may reflect the late-Victorian and Edwardian appetite for cosmopolitan cookery collections aimed at travellers and at hostesses assembling a foreign menu at home.