So There Was This Pigeon

So there was this pigeon. Olga handed it to me on a plate and it was naked, raw, challenging. I couldn’t really remember what pigeon tasted like, so I wanted to cook it simply, so as to learn that. What to do?

I never met poultry that wasn’t improved by brining, so I put some water into a plastic sack, then a handful of sugar and a similar amount of salt. I tossed in a branch of rosemary, thyme branches and some bay leaves. In went the bird, the air was pressed out and the bag sealed. It all went into the fridge for 24 hours. Had I been using a marinade with strong flavors, I would never leave it for so long, but this was a pretty mild concoction.

I looked up some recipes and they ranged from the “Shove it into the oven for an hour” to “add these 14 ingredients and then cook them together for a day.” This pigeon was homegrown, healthy and the likes of it would not come my way often, if ever again. I noticed that 200° C seemed to be a common denominator, so I set the oven for that temperature and set it for convection, to make the most of the skin.

I took out a le Creuset gratin dish, which is cast iron coated with thick enamel. I drizzled some new oil into it and tipped the dish to spread it around. The pigeon came out of the refrigerator and got dried off with paper towels, then the I removed the herbs and stuffed them into the cavity. Plop onto the cooking dish.
Carrots and onions and potatoes were peeled and oiled. Plop those too, around the bird. A sprinkling of sel gris from Brittany on the vegetables, and then into the hot oven.

It didn’t take long for nice smells to start. I checked on it a few times and towards an hour stuck my instant thermometer into the inner thigh — I don’t know why many of these descriptions are creating personal and not very nice images in my mind, but there must be something about fowl that remind me of myself? Anyway, it read 175° F, and I took it out.

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Everything was just as you see it. All the meat is dark, and I hadn’t remembered that. I deglazed the baking dish, but didn’t need the juices since the pigeon was lovely just as it came from the oven. What you see would feed two, with maybe more carrots for normal people who do not eat them only for the vitamins.

I can’t think of anything simpler to make. The hard part might be finding a pigeon if you don’t live in Europe. Not that there aren’t pigeons in the USA, but they are not dead, gutted and plucked in Central Park