The Man Who Loved Pigeons: Rémy Anézo and Les Pigeons De Mesquer
One man’s quest to raise the highest quality pigeons France has ever seen.
The pigeon has long had the reputation as a dirty scavenger best known for flapping around city parks and squares. Yet the bird has, in fact, been domesticated and bred for food in France since antiquity. Indeed, by the Middle Ages pigeons were gracing the table of the elite, a delicacy of nobility and kings like Louis XIV. By the time Auguste Escoffier penned his iconic cookbook “Ma Cuisine” in 1934, pigeonneaux aux petits pois (young pigeon with peas) had become a classic home dish.
So it was no surprise to find pigeon on the menu of Chef Á‰ric Guérin’s Michelin-starred La Mare aux Oiseaux, an hour’s drive west of the city of Nantes, between the Loire River and the Atlantic. Specifically Pigeon rÁ´ti de l’ami Rémy, or “roasted pigeon from our friend Rémy.”
L’ami Rémy is Rémy Anézo, a star among among local food producers, his pigeons one of the culinary treasures of this region of France. His property, Les Pigeons De Mesquer, sits on the outskirts of the tiny village of Mesquer, a sleepy hamlet 40 miles northwest from Nantes. It’s an idyllic setting where Rémy has been breeding and selling his pigeons for more than 30 years, an oasis of rustic barns and impressive wooden coops framing a pond where geese and ducks roam freely.
Rémy’s love for pigeons began at an early age. Rémy spent much of his childhood perched in the branches of the tree behind his family’s home observing the pigeons that came to nest. Day after day, he would scrutinize their behavior, contemplating every movement. Fascinated, he would see the eggs laid which would magically transform into baby chicks overnight as he slept. Once, he carefully dislodged a nest holding two eggs from its perch in the branches and carried it into his bedroom where he took up watch, sure that finally the secret of where tiny pigeonneaux come from would be revealed. Much to his disappointment, the eggs never hatched, but this only increased his curiosity and desire to uncover the secrets and mysteries of these birds.
Rémy happened to watch a televised interview with a professional breeder and, shocked, clapped his hands and exclaimed “Damn! You mean one can actually earn a living raising pigeons?!”
He soon had his own coop in the backyard with two or three couples; this fascination with pigeons continued into adulthood but remained a hobby. After following a more traditional route of school and then work as a drywaller, among other assorted jobs, it was completely by chance that his future became pigeons.
As he tells it, Rémy happened to watch a televised interview with a professional breeder and, shocked, clapped his hands and exclaimed “Damn! You mean one can actually earn a living raising pigeons?!” He immediately quit his job and turned his private coops into a business, adding structures and more birds and began selling his pigeonneaux on the market, to local wholesalers and restaurants.
His reputation spread during his first two decades raising pigeons, with the quality of his pigeons guaranteeing a growing and faithful local clientele. His business savvy grew with the venture; about ten years ago Rémy realized that the world and the food market were evolving and if his enterprise was to survive he needed to reach out to a wider public beyond his tiny corner of France. He began to network further afield and more and more chefs, many of them with Michelin stars, began to turn to him for his all-natural, artisan-bred birds, including Á‰ric Guérin of La Mare aux Oiseaux, Laurent Saudeau of Le Manoir de La Boulaie, and Yohann Lemonnier of L’Agapé.
His son Matthieu’s decision to change careers and join the family farm five years ago was the next turning point at Les Pigeons de Mesquer. Matthieu, now 29, left his previous job as a plumber and joined his father; he recently signed the papers which will make him a full partner, connecting Les Pigeons de Mesquer to the next generation and making it a true family business. Armed with a BTS Agricole, a diploma in agriculture and food production, Matthieu is deeply involved with the business side of Les Pigeons de Mesquer, the head to Rémy’s heart and soul. His priority, he explains, is to guarantee both the excellence and the consistency of the quality of their birds even while modernizing the breeding, processing and marketing of their product .
There is absolutely nothing industrial about this rustic, family-owned and run business, “and there never will be,” say Rémy, now a 58-year-old soft-spoken man with a mop of tousled salt-and-pepper hair. Everything, from the housing to the slaughter, is traditional and natural, meant to keep the birds free from stress as well as GMO- and chemical-free. Rémy says this guarantees his meat is healthful, tender and flavorful. The birds are pampered, nesting on straw and pine needles and allowed to roam freely in their large coops protected from visitors and to reproduce at their own natural rhythm. The coops face the rising sun, the direction pigeons in the wild innately expose their nests to, and are neither heated during the winter nor cooled in the summer, allowing the birds to live and breed in a natural climate and in the iodized ocean air from the nearby Atlantic.
Rémy Anézo, founder of Les Pigeons De Mesquer.
A close up of one of Rémy’s pigeons.
The pigeon coops at Les Pigeons De Mesquer.
Rémy’s son Matthieu, who has joined his father at the farm.
[mf_mosaic_item src=”https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/p5.jpg” number=”5″ caption=”The sign for Les Pigeons De Mesquer. The tagline ‘de l’oeuf Á l’assiette’ translates to ‘from egg to plate.’]
“They are birds, not poultry!” Rémy adamantly points out. “Like humans, they form and remain constant couples and raise and feed their own young. There are up to 3,000 couples at any one time on the property, counting seven different species both breeders and ornamental birds kept purely for show,” he explains. Pigeons pair off and remain a constant couple for life, hatching up to fourteen offspring a year. They also share the care of the young; the male sits on the eggs all day, the female all night, and, as Matthieu points out, “they are so constant in their brooding habit that you can set your watch to it.”
Newly hatched birds are fed exclusively by their parents for the first week on lait de jabot, crop milk, which is not milk but rather a protein and fat-rich secretion which is produced naturally by certain birds and regurgitated into the mouths of the young. Once grown, the pigeons are fed on a mix of whole grains, including corn, wheat, peas, sunflower, enriched soy granules and grits, a mixture of mineral-rich crushed shells from off the coast of Brittany collected specifically for Rémy’s pigeons.
Several years ago, Rémy decided to build an abattoir on his property and oversee the slaughter himself in order to completely control the process and spare his birds the stress of transport to an offsite slaughterhouse. The pigeons are slaughtered quite young, 30 to 35 days old. “Timing is as important as picking ripe fruit,” Rémy explains. “If picked too early, fruit is not ripe and will have no flavor, picked too late and it is no longer at its best. There is an ideal moment to slaughter the birds when the flesh is perfect.”
They are never bled, which makes for richer tasting meat, more game than poultry. The day after slaughter, the pigeonneaux are delivered to the Anézo’s clients fresh, never frozen, as well as sold in Rémy’s own boutique shop.
Quality over quantity is definitely the rule at Les Pigeons de Mesquer; both father and son are adamant in the all-natural, chemical-free quality of their production. Although the pigeons are today fed exclusively on certified GMO-free corn and grains, the pair hope they will soon be growing their own, just one more step towards total control of the quality of their birds.
Although pigeon is still considered a great treat by chefs and is found on the best restaurant menus in France, Rémy understands that the general public remains wary of birds with a bad reputation. Which is why the Anézos open Les Pigeons de Mesquer each weekend for guided visits and lunch, giving Rémy the chance to impart both his knowledge and his passion to the general public.
Rémy also partners with several chefs, bringing them to Mesquer where they offer cooking demonstrations and tastings. These events allow him to show potential buyers that pigeons are not only safe to eat but delicious. The chefs reassure consumers that they too are able to prepare restaurant-quality food at home, while the classes allow visitors to discover and connect with the region’s top chefs and producers.
The property’s boutique walls are lined with open, well-stocked shelves filled with jars of delicacies prepared from recipes created by Chef Á‰ric Guérin: Pigeon and Foie Gras Rillettes, Pigeon Confit, Pigeon Tagines with either prunes and preserved lemon or with olives, that visitors can bring home to sample. The several tables for guests are spread with printouts of recipes created by Rémy’s wife, free for the taking, yet another encouragement to cook with a Mesquer pigeon.
Rémy is a rare blend of tradition and modernity, defending the old-fashioned ways of his livelihood while keeping a clear-eyed vision of the future. But Rémy, more than anything, just loves his birds. He succeeded in creating a business out of a boy’s passion and thirty years later he has not swayed from either that passion or his goal: raising his birds naturally and with love, sharing his knowledge, and encouraging people to step back in the kitchen and cook up one of his pigeons.
Follow us
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].by Jamie Schler, Modern Farmer
November 25, 2013
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
SubmitNecessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and are used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.