A dull day at Puylaurens market - off to fetch the pigeons

I’d ordered 20 pigeons from a local eleveur who’s a regular at the Puylaurens Wednesday Market. They were not the luscious young pigeons known as “pigeoneau” or squab in English, but the older breeders meant to be cooked “en salmis”. I’d been experimenting with versions of “en salmis” – not too successfully – but now I thought I’d found the solution – I would confit them!

Little Shiva and Thierry Tillier came to visit, to see Padiès for the Visible Trash exhibition planned for next year, and to distribute Fingerpainting on Mars – they became a part of this gory experiment – Shiva took the photos and the clip…..

home from the market - 20 "pigeons pour en salmis"

a pile of pigeons - starting to be processed

I googled “pigeon confit”, found a recipe in the Gaurdian from the “Fat Duck” in England – I was off and running… I make duck confit quite regularly so this didn’t seem to be too much of an issue… the salting mixture was great – coriander, allspice, bay leaves, juniper berries, fresh thyme, oramge and lemon zest and even more – what could go wrong! well, they did say to hang the pigeons….

I started processing the birds….

major disection

off with their heads!

discarded backbones

done at last!

After many hours of dissecting, they were ready to be salted with the exotic mix.

adding the salting mix

The next morning I awoke really early to remove the pigeons from the salt and dry them off.
In they went to the warming oven which supposedly could maintain a constant low temperature (the recipe called for 70°C) with mountains of duck fat from my previous confit escapades…..11 hours later, the pigeons had to be ready! The recipe said 6 hours – but they were still hard… I pulled them out – Sukhada arrived – we served her pigeon – she was so polite, we all resembled cavemen – ripping into pigeon – they were delicious – but tough! Olivier’s been inventing pigeon rescue recipes ever since!!

slow cook in the warming oven 70°C