Home › Game › Prairie Chickens (Cut out all shot wash)
Prairie Chickens (Cut out all shot wash)
Cut out all shot, wash thoroughly but quickly, using some soda in the water, rinse and dry, fill with dressing, sew up with cotton thread, and tie down the legs and wings; place in a steamer over hot water till done, remove to a dripping-pan, cover with butter, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, place in the oven and baste with the melted butter until a nice brown; serve with either apple-sauce, cranberries, or currant jelly. -Mrs. Godard.
A two-stage method — steam first, then brown in the oven — that suits a lean wild bird better than roasting alone. A few of the instructions assume a nineteenth-century pantry and a bird you shot yourself.
- Sourcing the birdGreater prairie chickens are still hunted under license in a handful of Plains states, but they are not sold commercially and the Attwater's subspecies is federally endangered. Farmed pheasant, or two 1 1/2 lb guinea fowl, behaves the same way in this recipe.
- Cutting out the shotThis is not optional advice from a squeamish cook. Lead shot left in the flesh is both a dental hazard and a genuine source of lead exposure; trim generously around each wound channel, where fragments and feather debris are driven in.
- Soda in the wash waterPeriod game recipes sometimes call for soda in the rinse, apparently on the idea that it cut the strong flavor of blood and fat left after field dressing; this one does not say how much, or whether baking or washing soda is meant. It does little that thorough rinsing in cold water will not, and it can slightly soften the skin. Skip it if you like.
- "Fill with dressing"An open call for whatever bread stuffing the house used — Buckeye Cookery gives several in its poultry chapter. Stuff loosely; a packed cavity slows heat penetration and the bird overcooks at the breast before the center is safe.
- Steaming, then the ovenSteam over simmering water until the thigh joint moves freely, roughly 35-50 minutes for a bird of this size. Then roast at 425F to brown, 15-20 minutes, basting. Pull when the breast reads 160-165F and any stuffing in the cavity reaches 165F.
- Cotton thread and trussingUse plain undyed cotton butcher's twine rather than sewing thread from a workbasket — modern all-purpose sewing thread is often polyester or polyester-cored, and may soften or fuse in the oven.
- Dredge with flourThe flour over buttered skin is doing the same job as a modern flour-and-fat rub: it dries out, catches color fast, and gives the basting butter something to cling to. Dust it thin or it goes pasty.
- YieldA prairie chicken is a small bird, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb, and serves two, three at a stretch. For four, plan on two birds.
Prairie chicken was a plains bird that came east in barrels. Through the 1870s and 1880s, market hunters shipped grouse by the railcar from Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and the Dakotas to city game dealers in Chicago, Cincinnati and New York, which is how a Minneapolis-published Ohio household book like Buckeye Cookery (issued 1877, growing out of the 1876 Centennial Buckeye Cook Book) could carry a recipe for it alongside quail and venison. The trade collapsed with the birds: the eastern heath hen, the same species' Atlantic subspecies, was extinct by 1932, and market hunting of wild game was curtailed in the United States by the Lacey Act of 1900. What survives here is the technique — steaming a lean, hard-working wild bird until tender, then finishing it in a hot oven under butter — which was one common answer when cooks faced meat with no fat to protect it, and the sweet-tart accompaniments of apple sauce, cranberries or currant jelly that nineteenth-century tables often served with dark game.