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Game and Poultry (To preserve game and poultry)
To preserve game and poultry in summer, draw as soon as possible after they are killed, wash in several waters, have in readiness a kettle of boiling water, plunge them in, drawing them up and down by the legs, so that the water may pass freely through them; do this for five minutes, drain, wipe dry, and hang in a cold place; when perfectly cold, rub the insides and necks with pepper; prepared in this way, they will keep two days in warm weather; when used wash thoroughly. Or wash well in soda-water, rinse in clear water, place inside several pieces of charcoal, cover with a cloth, and hang in a dark, cool place. The most delicate birds can be preserved in this
This is a hot-weather holding method from a kitchen with no mechanical refrigeration, and it fails on exactly the point that matters: the birds never reach or stay at a safe temperature. The notes below explain the vocabulary and the specific hazard.
- Why it failsA five-minute plunge in boiling water scalds the surface and the body cavity but does not pasteurise the muscle, and the bird is then held for two days in whatever cool place a summer kitchen could offer. Salmonella, Campylobacter and Clostridium perfringens multiply fastest between roughly 40°F and 140°F, and an unrefrigerated larder in warm weather sits inside that range; poultry held there for two days is unsafe, and later cooking is not a reliable remedy, since some spoilage organisms leave heat-stable toxins behind.
- Charcoal is not a preservativeThe second method rests on the nineteenth-century belief that charcoal absorbs the gases of putrefaction and so arrests it. Charcoal does adsorb odours, which is why the birds smell better than they are; it has no antimicrobial action and simply masks the evidence of spoilage.
- Pepper is not a preservative eitherRubbing the cavity and neck with pepper was commonly recommended in period sources, as much to deter blowflies from the vent as for any other reason. Whatever the intent, it does nothing meaningful to the microbial load.
- "Draw"To draw a bird is to eviscerate it — remove the intestines, crop and lungs. Period cooks knew that gut contents spoil first and taint the carcass, which is the sound instinct behind an otherwise unsound method.
- "Soda-water"Not carbonated water. This means a solution of washing soda (sodium carbonate) in water, used as a degreasing and deodorising wash. It was a general kitchen cleaner of the period, not a food-safe rinse by current standards.
- What the period was really solvingGame shot in hot weather had to travel from field to larder without ice. The modern answer is the one the book could not use: chill to below 40°F as soon as possible after drawing, or freeze. Consult a current game-handling guide rather than adapting the timings here.
Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in the 1870s and 80s for households where the icebox was a luxury and the summer larder was a cool room or a cellar. Hints like this one sit alongside the recipes because keeping food was as much a daily problem as cooking it, and general cookbooks of the period commonly carried pages of them. The charcoal method reflects a widely held Victorian idea that decomposition was chiefly a matter of foul gases, so an absorbent placed in the cavity would halt it — a view still appearing in print in the 1880s even as Pasteur's work on microbial spoilage was displacing it. Hanging game to age it, by contrast, is a genuinely old practice with a real basis in enzymatic tenderising, and the two ideas are tangled together here: the author is trying to extend into hot weather a technique that only works reliably in the cold.