- How to cook pigeon.

[This one's for you Mark Zuckerberg - for when that whole hunting thing becomes too much of a hassle.]

In the days of the settlers and pioneers, early autumn was pigeon season.

Pigeons could be eaten any time of the year, but just after harvest when the birds had fattened on grain, they were a prized food.

Pigeons were so popular that there was an entire pigeon canning industry built up around them.

But the settlers and pioneers out on the prairies had to hunt their own.

From the 1854 Canadian Housekeeper's Guide written by Mrs C. P. Traill, we bring you a recipe for pigeon pie.

"Season your pigeons well with pepper and salt; as many as will lie in your pie dish; dust a little flour on, thin; add a cup of hot water; cover your pie and bake an hour."

As simple as that!

It's gotta be good. Her chicken pie recipe includes all kinds of spices - but pigeons are served au naturel.

Minus the feathers of course. She has plucked them and dressed them first.

I've never been anywhere that didn't have hoards of pigeons, so this is a meal that's within reach of all of us. Literally.

There is a small sting in the tail to this recipe. Mrs Traill was almost certainly cooking Passenger Pigeons.

They were once the most numerous bird in North America.

One sighting in 1866 in southern Ontario was described as being 1 mile wide, 300 miles long, and taking 14 hours to pass a single point with number estimates in excess of 3.5 billion birds in the flock.

Selling in the cities for 1 cent a bird, they were the basic food of millions of poor people and slaves.

One of the last large roosts of Passenger Pigeons was in Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878. 50,000 birds a day were killed and the hunt continued for nearly five months.

By 1890 they were all but gone. Martha, thought to be the world's last Passenger Pigeon, died on September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo.

So if you're planning on cooking up pigeon for your dinner, make sure it's a common Central Park kind of pigeon.

Fattened on popcorn, Cheezits and Doritos, they've probably got their own unique taste, well suited to the times.

For more information and free downloads about living the life of a settler or pioneer visit www.PioneerHandbooks.com.

Even if you never expect to be eating pigeon, you can still hit the Facebook Like button below and save this how-to from disappearing into history

It's easy enough to do and a good way to keep this knowledge alive.