In search of the best pigeon B&B

The woods are full of birds until you decide to go and shoot them, laments Blue Zulu

Were there ‘dietary requirements’ in the 1970s? They didn’t exist at school. If the overcooked liver dolloped on your plate wasn’t to your liking, off it went into the pigswill bucket and you went hungry. And I’m certain my parents hadn’t heard of them either. Their friends came round for dinner and there wasn’t a veggie, vegan or pescatarian among them.

That perhaps explains why game, particularly woodpigeon, fetched such extraordinary prices. I remember a 1975 classified ad in Shooting Times offering 75p a bird when you could trot down to the local pub and buy a pint for 28p. Imagine if that held true today: you deliver 10 pigeons to the gamedealer and come home with enough kitty for 30 pints of London Pride.

Instead, the going rate is around 20p, which isn’t enough to cover one cartridge. Yet walk into a gastropub and order wild woodpigeon breast with bramble jus and you’re lucky to get a quid back from a tenner.

The price is so pathetic that I can’t bear to sell such excellent meat to the gamedealer. I only deliver them when I’ve had a really good day, the weather’s warm and I don’t have time to dress scores of birds — I’d rather someone ate them than they spoiled. As a result, my freezers are stuffed with pigeon. Happily, most people seem to love them, especially when I serve them as nibbles, with slices of warm breast plonked into a mini Yorkshire pudding with a little onion marmalade. I’ve just made a batch using birds from the last roost shoot.