Pigeon Soup
(Belgium.) Blend 1 ounce of butter with 6 ounces of flour, add 3 pigeons, cut up and fried in butter, 1 ounce of chopped ham, 2 quarts of consomme or veal stock, parsley, thyme, a bayleaf, 1 leek, and a piece of celery. Cook 1 hour, strain it, cut the meat into dice, add 1 cup of cooked green peas, salt, pepper, 1 cup of cooked and sliced carrots, and a glass of white wine.
A thickened Belgian game soup that finishes as something between a soup and a light stew. The instructions are terse in the manner of the book, and two of the quantities need thought before you start.
- The butter and flour are suspectOne ounce of butter cannot absorb six ounces of flour. Either the figures were transposed in printing, or the flour is meant as a dredge for the birds. Treat it as a roux of equal weights — around 2 oz each — and hold back the rest until you see how thick the strained soup is.
- PigeonsThe recipe does not specify, but these are most likely young birds, sold now as squab, roughly 12-16 oz each dressed. Three of them give a generous amount of dark, livery meat. Poussin or Cornish game hen substitutes without complaint, though the flavour is much milder.
- Fry, then simmerBrowning the cut-up birds in butter before they go into the stock is the whole point of the flavour here. Get real colour on the skin and bones and deglaze the pan into the pot.
- Strain, then pickThe order in the original reads oddly. Lift the pieces out, pull the meat from the bones and dice it, then strain the liquid through a fine sieve and return the meat. Pigeon bones are small and splinter easily, so do not skip the sieve.
- One hour is rightOne hour -- This is what the recipe gives. Young squab is tender and does not want long cooking; an hour at a bare simmer extracts the bones without turning the meat to fibre. Older birds may need longer.
- A glass of white wineIn books of this period a wineglass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, a quarter-cup, though the measure is elastic. Add it at the end, off the boil, so it stays bright — the peas and carrots are already cooked and only need warming through.
- StockThe recipe allows consomme or veal stock; two quarts of either gives the body the soup depends on. A light chicken stock works; a cube-based broth will taste thin against the browned bird and ham.
- YieldAbout six to eight servings as a first course, or four as a main with bread.
Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) gathered dishes country by country for American cooks. Pigeon was ordinary food across the Low Countries well into the twentieth century, kept in dovecotes and towers as a reliable source of meat when other birds were out of season. The finish — cooked peas and sliced carrots stirred in at the end, plus a glass of white wine — is of a piece with the period's way of turning a strained broth into something substantial enough to open a dinner.