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Woodcock and Snipe
Some epicures say that the woodcock should never be drawn, but that they should be fastened to a small bird-spit, and should be put to roast before a clear fire; a slice of toast put in a pan below each bird in order to catch the trail; baste them with melted butter; lay the toast on a hot dish, and the birds on the toast. They require from fifteen to twenty minutes to roast.
Snipe are dressed in the same manner, but require less time to cook.
A method rather than a formula: two small game birds roasted whole, undrawn, over toast that collects the drippings. The technique survives almost unchanged in French and British game cookery, and translates to a modern oven without much trouble.
- The hinge: the trail"Trail" is the bird's intestine, left inside deliberately so it melts into the toast beneath. Woodcock and snipe are the birds most often treated this way, on the traditional reasoning that they feed on worms rather than grain. Some cooks pinched out the gizzard, and the head was often split and the brain eaten.
- Fire to oven"A clear fire" means glowing coals with no flame or smoke, radiating hard from the side. In an oven, a hot setting (around 450F) on an upper rack, birds on a rack over the toast, is the nearest equivalent. Fifteen to twenty minutes was intended to leave the breast pink rather than well done; snipe, being considerably smaller, need less time, as the recipe says.
- Doneness and riskThis is a rare-cooked whole bird eaten with its intestine in place. That is the classic treatment and it is still practised, but it carries a real pathogen risk that a well-done bird does not. Wild game handled and chilled poorly in the field is the main problem, not the recipe.
- BastingThese birds have almost no fat, so the melted butter the recipe calls for is doing structural work rather than adding flavour. A thin sheet of pork fat or a rasher of bacon tied over the breast is an old and effective alternative, removed for the last few minutes to let the skin colour.
- The toastCut it thick and toast it dry before it goes under the birds, or it disintegrates. It is not a garnish: the recipe has the toast laid on the hot dish and the birds set on top, and it is eaten with them.
- SourcingWoodcock and snipe are migratory game birds. In the United States the sale of wild-shot migratory birds is prohibited, so they come from a licensed hunter in season rather than a shop; in Britain they may be bought in season. Check the carcass for lead pellets and shot channels before roasting.
- YieldOne woodcock per person, two snipe. The traditional accompaniments are the toast, a little of the pan butter, and nothing else that competes.
Woodcock has held an unreasonable amount of culinary prestige for centuries, largely because it is difficult to shoot, arrives only in migration, and tastes strongly of liver and iron in a way no farmed bird does. The instruction not to draw it appears in English cookery books from at least the seventeenth century onward and rests on the belief that a bird feeding on earthworms carries no foul gut content; French kitchens formalised the same idea with the b case: the b casse roasted sans vider, its trail worked into a paste for the croute. Snipe is the smaller cousin and was treated as a lesser version of the same bird the English word sniper is generally traced to the difficulty of shooting one. The recipe's own hedge, "Some epicures say," shows the compiler passing on a connoisseur's practice rather than vouching for it.