Partridges
Prepare partridges as you would chickens, but leave the feet on, scalding them and drawing off their skin skewer up the feet, crossed over the vent, larder the breast with boiled fat ham, roast over a moderate fire forty minutes, and baste with butter before you take them up. Make a gravy from half a pint of stock (white) and one spoonful of flour and two of butter, braided together, or serve with bread sauce. Garnish with slices of lemon.
A terse nineteenth-century game recipe that assumes you already know how to truss and roast a bird. Two things need attention before anything else: the cooking time, and the odd instruction to leave the feet on.
- Forty minutes is too longA modern oven-roasted grey or chukar partridge (roughly 12-16 oz) is done in 20-25 minutes at 425F, to about 160F in the thickest part of the breast. The original assumes an open fire where much of the heat is radiant and uneven; forty minutes in a closed oven produces dry, livery meat.
- "A moderate fire"Probably roasting before or over coals rather than baking, though books of this period also used "roast" loosely for oven cooking. If you use an oven, a hot oven of about 425F will colour the skin before the breast overcooks; a moderate 350F is likelier to leave the skin flabby.
- The feetScalding and skinning the feet, then skewering them crossed over the vent, was a presentation convention that also held the cavity closed. It serves no culinary purpose now. Truss with string, or simply tie the legs together.
- Larding"Larder the breast with boiled fat ham" means threading strips of cooked fat through the breast meat with a larding needle. Barding is easier and nearly as effective: lay thin sheets of fatty bacon or pork back fat over the breast, remove for the last five minutes to brown.
- "Braided together"Almost certainly a garbling of "kneaded" or the older "brayed" together, that is, beurre manié: one spoonful flour worked cold into two of butter, whisked into the simmering stock in pieces to thicken it. Half a pint of white stock is one cup.
- Bread sauceThe alternative offered, and still the standard English accompaniment to roast game birds: milk infused with onion and cloves, thickened with fresh white breadcrumbs and finished with butter. Not sweet.
- Resting and yieldRest the birds ten minutes under loose foil before carving. One partridge per person is the usual serving; the recipe gives no number.
- ShotWild birds may still carry lead pellets. Feel along the breast before larding and warn anyone at the table.
Game was still largely something that arrived from a field rather than a shop, and cookbooks treated it as a category apart from poultry: hung, handled and sauced differently. The instruction to leave the feet on and skewer them across the vent is a survival from older English roasting practice, where small game birds were sent to table with feet or head attached; this is often said to have served to prove what species they were, a point of some importance when partridge, grouse and pigeon all came to the kitchen plucked and anonymous. Larding was the standard answer to the problem of lean wild meat over a dry heat, and bread sauce, generally traced to medieval bread-thickened sauces, had by this period become the near-obligatory partner to roast game bird in the English-speaking kitchen. The garbled, doubled phrasing here ("over the over the vent", "Garnish with slices of Garnish with slices of lemon") suggests a text set and reprinted with little proofreading.