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Broiled Pheasant or Prairie Chicken
Scald and skin, cut off the breast and cut the rest up in joints, being careful to remove all shot; put in hot water all except the breast (which will be tender enough without parboiling), and boil until it can be pierced with fork, take out, rub over salt, pepper, and butter, and broil with breast over brisk fire; place a lump of butter on each piece, and set all in the oven for a few minutes. For breakfast, serve on fried mush, and for dinner on toast with a bit of currant jelly over each piece. Or it may be served with toast cut in pieces about two inches square, over which pour gravy made by thickening the liquor in which the birds were boiled, with a little butter and flour rubbed together and stirred in while boiling.
This is a two-stage method: the tough working muscles are simmered first, the breast is not, and everything meets at the last minute over high heat. Keeping those two clocks separate is the whole trick.
- The hinge: cook the breast separately and brieflyWild pheasant and prairie chicken breast has almost no fat and dries out quickly if pushed past done; poultry is generally recommended to reach 165F, so watch it closely rather than trusting the clock. Broil it a few minutes a side while the parboiled legs and thighs, which need roughly 25-40 minutes of simmering to become tender, finish alongside.
- "Brisk fire"An open grate at its hottest. Use a broiler at full heat with the rack about 4 inches from the element, or a charcoal grill with the coals fully lit and no lid.
- "Set all in the oven for a few minutes"Effectively a basting and holding step rather than further cooking. The book gives no temperature; a moderately hot oven for only a few minutes lets the butter melt into the meat, and longer undoes the point above.
- Scald and skinScalding loosens the feathers so they and the skin come away together. Skinning suits joints that are then boiled, but it removes the fat you would otherwise render, which is why butter is rubbed on before broiling and added again as a lump afterwards (and once more in the optional gravy).
- Remove all shotNot fussiness. Shot pellets crack teeth, and in this period the shot would have been lead (lead shot was banned for waterfowl hunting in the US in 1991, but it remains legal for upland game in many places). Work along the wound channels with your fingers and discard bruised, blood-shot flesh.
- Fried mushStiff cornmeal porridge, poured into a pan, chilled overnight, sliced about half an inch thick and fried in butter or bacon fat until crisp. The same thing sold today as prepared polenta in a tube.
- The gravyButter and flour rubbed together and dropped into simmering liquid is beurre manié. Use equal weights, add it in small pieces, and let it boil a minute or two so the flour loses its raw taste. The parboiling liquor will be thin, so reduce it first if you want real flavor.
- Prairie chicken todayThe greater prairie chicken is legally hunted only in a few states with short seasons; the Attwater's subspecies is endangered and the heath hen is extinct. In practice this is a pheasant recipe now, and farmed pheasant works well, though it is fatter and needs less parboiling.
- YieldOne pheasant serves two generously; a prairie chicken, being smaller, serves one to two.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in 1877, when a game chapter was a practical necessity rather than a novelty: prairie chicken and pheasant reached midwestern tables through market hunters and household guns alike, and greater prairie chickens were still abundant enough on the tallgrass prairie to be shipped east by the barrel. The doubled serving instructions here — on fried mush for breakfast, on toast with currant jelly for dinner — mark game as ordinary food in that household, eaten at whatever meal it happened to be ready for, not saved for company. Market hunting on that scale ended with state and federal protections in the early twentieth century, and the prairie chicken's collapse followed the plowing of its habitat rather than the cookbook; the recipe now reads as a record of a bird most cooks will never handle.