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Capercailzie, Roast
Place some slices of fat bacon on the breast of the bird, and bake it in a fairly hot oven for one and a half hours. Baste frequently with butter, and send to table with brown gravy, a cut orange, and bread sauce. Probable cost, 3s.
The method is sound old-fashioned game cookery, but the bird itself is the problem: capercaillie is legally protected across most of its former range, and in Britain it cannot be taken or sold at all.
- The bird is protectedThe capercaillie was hunted in Victorian Scotland and sold in game dealers' shops, which is why Cassell's could quote a price. Shooting was voluntarily suspended in the 1990s as the Scottish population collapsed, and the bird now has full legal protection; it is red-listed and cannot be shot, sold, or served. There is no lawful way to source one in the UK.
- Where it is still shotLimited hunting continues under licence in parts of Scandinavia and eastern Europe. Anyone cooking a legally taken bird there should work from a current game-cookery source rather than this entry.
- An hour and a half is a long roastAn adult cock capercaillie can weigh 9 lb or more, so the timing suits the bird as Victorians knew it. Applied to any smaller game bird the same figure would produce something dry and grey; modern practice roasts game hot and briefly and rests it.
- Why the bacon and the butterWild grouse of this size carries almost no fat and the breast dries out before the legs are done. The bacon barding and constant basting are the whole technique, not a garnish.
- The cut orangeNot decorative. Capercaillie feed heavily on pine needles and shoots in winter and the flesh takes on a strong resinous, turpentine note; sharp citrus was one common counterweight, served here alongside the bread sauce.
- "Probable cost, 3s."Three shillings, a housekeeping-guide price for a whole large game bird -- a substantial sum for a single item.
Cassell's placed the capercaillie among the grouse because that is what it is: Tetrao urogallus, the largest member of the grouse family, a turkey-sized forest bird of the old Scots pinewoods. It was hunted out of Britain by the late eighteenth century and reintroduced from Sweden in 1837-38 at Taymouth in Perthshire by Lord Breadalbane, after which it spread widely enough through the Highland conifer plantations to become a regular item on game dealers' lists — hence its appearance in a general household dictionary with a price attached. The resinous flavour drew persistent complaints from Victorian writers, and the sharp orange served here reads as one answer to it. The reintroduced population is generally reckoned to have peaked in the 1960s and 1970s and then fell steeply with the loss of native pinewood, deer-fence collisions and cold wet breeding seasons; the bird is now one of the most closely protected in Britain, and this recipe reads as a record of a game market that no longer exists.