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![]() | A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on January 25, 2011.
The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that squab pies, which Charles Dickens said inspired "hatred of the whole human race", are not actually made with squabs?
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Just letting you know, I just started the stub because I saw the red link in this article. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 19:07, 21 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
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Reviewer: Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 10:04, 23 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Verjuice or cider would go well in a mutton or pigeon pie, & I think I will have to get some decent cider for this pie. :) Verjuice will have to wait for the crab-apples. Archolman 23:11, 22 March 2011 (UTC)Reply
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
After I edited the text around that Dickens quote (I changed "described it as..." to "said it was..."), I looked at All The Year Round, where it's made clear that most of the contributors to that publication weren't acknowledged. So should that quote actually be so clearly attributed to Dickens (or Wilkie Collins)? - unless Ella Ann Oppenlander said so.[1] Perhaps "it was described in Dickens' All The Year Round as..." would be safer? —SMALLJIM 13:09, 23 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
There are some problems with the section that reads: "Although it appears that squab pie did originally contain pigeons,[4] mutton and apples have been used as a substitute since at least 1772[5] and it was featured in a recipe book in 1784[6] using a recipe that has remained in cookbooks for years afterwards.[7]"
The 1784 reference is to Hannah Glasse and her book Art of Cookery. Glasse is well known for not originating her recipes, instead taking them from already published books. (An example can be seen in her recipe for calf's chitterlings [2], which is a verbatim repetition of an earlier recipe. I have found it in a 1737 English cookery book (The lady's companion: or, An infallible guide to the fair sex [3], and there are probably earlier versions yet that I haven't come across in my brief Google Books search. Hannah Glasse's 1784 version is identical.)
Hannah was up to her old tricks with the squab pie recipe: she has clearly taken it from the same 1737 book as above [4] and there may well be even earlier yet versions in other books that I haven't come across.
So
and
86.136.24.112 (talk) 08:55, 25 January 2011 (UTC)Reply
Hello Worm. Squabs are young pigeons of any sort, not just domesticated. The squab we had when I was a child was wood-pigeon, which I used to collect, with a couple of friends, and we would take them home for eating. (I used to give them to Gran or Mum, who would have everything else ready to make a pie when I got back!) We used to go round the fields with long sticks & poke the pigeons nests & squabs out of the willows & low elm & oak branches, & earn a bit of pocket-money from the farmer.
"pigeon" is Norman, "dove" is Saxon. But complications immediately arise. We know from Ivanhoe that the basic principle of Norman/Saxon animal naming should mean that the Norman name is food and the Saxon name is not: Beef/cow, pork/pig, veal/calf. But nobody eats "pigeon." In fact fried pigeon is usually called "squab," at least in America. And "squab" is probably a Saxon word as well.
[Well, there's another layer of complication; like all kinds of knowledge, etymology is fractal, often twisting through more contradictions as you look closer at the pattern. "Dove" and "squab" are apparently not originally Anglo-Saxon, but Norse in origin, and seem to enter written Standard English from forms used in the north of England. The Anglo-Saxon word for the animal is "culver," which appears unrelated to any other word. For that matter, "pigeon" is not a common Romance word, but a French innovation; the common Romance words (including the somewhat distant-looking Spanish paloma) are based on the Latin word columba.]
So with the pigeon/dove, we have the rare bird that was eaten in English but kept for other purposes in Norman French. Eaten as squab, of course, though there's another misleading term: squab is the name for a pigeon chick, but what we probably eat, if we ever do, is a more mature animal given a more appetizing younger name (much as most of the "lamb" eaten in the US is more properly "mutton").
Peculiar too is that the "dysphemism" (negative term) for the bird is Norman, and the euphemism is Saxon.
The etymology is odd, given the rigidity with which the Saxon/Norman divide generally operates. Archolman 00:02, 24 March 2011 (UTC)Reply