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Grouse Cutlets
Take a brace of young grouse, split them in halves, remove the wing bones, and tuck the legs inside. Season them with pepper and salt, and fry them in a little hot butter till brightly browned on both sides. Dredge a little flour into the butter; add gradually a quarter of a pint of gravy Espagnole (see GRAVY ESPAGNOLE), season rather highly with salt and cayenne, simmer for ten minutes, and serve with gravy poured over the grouse. Time, fry till brown. Probable cost of grouse, variable, from 2s. 6d. to 6s. 6d. per brace. Sufficient, a brace of birds for four or five persons.
A simple sauté of split game birds finished in a brown sauce. The one thing to watch is the ten-minute simmer, which will take a lean grouse breast well past where modern cooks want it.
- A braceTwo birds. Split in halves gives four portions, which the original stretches to four or five people. The recipe itself names no accompaniments.
- "Cutlets"Not a chop in the butcher's sense. Here it means a neat boneless-ish portion: half a bird with the wing bones out and the legs folded under so the piece sits flat in the pan and browns evenly.
- Quarter of a pintImperial measure, so 5 fl oz, about 150 ml or two-thirds of a cup. Enough to coat four halves, not to poach them.
- Gravy EspagnoleThe classic brown sauce: a brown roux slackened with brown stock and mirepoix, simmered long and skimmed. Good bought demi-glace, or reduced brown chicken or game stock lightly thickened, does the same job here.
- The ten-minute simmerGrouse breast is very lean and dries out with prolonged cooking. If you prefer, brown the halves, lift them out, build and simmer the sauce for its ten minutes, then return the birds at the end to heat through.
- Sourcing the birdRed grouse is a wild shot bird with a short season from 12 August, sold by game dealers in Britain and rarely elsewhere. Where it is unavailable, partridge, quail or squab take the same treatment; farmed poultry will not give the same flavour and needs longer cooking.
- Season rather highlyCayenne and salt are doing deliberate work against a strong, slightly bitter meat. Season the sauce at the end, after it has reduced, or it will oversalt.
- ShotWild birds often carry lead pellets and bone splinters. Feel over the breasts before cooking and warn anyone at the table.
Cassell's was compiled for late-Victorian households: the price note, from 2s. 6d. to 6s. 6d. a brace, marks it as a luxury bought from a poulterer rather than something the kitchen took for granted. Red grouse cannot be farmed and its season opens on 12 August, the "Glorious Twelfth," which made the first birds of the year a fashionable object in London dining rooms and gave the bird a prestige that roasting whole usually served. Calling the halves "cutlets" is a piece of Anglo-French kitchen vocabulary of the period, in which a boned, flattened portion served with a made sauce like Espagnole may well have signalled a dish worked up in the French manner rather than sent plainly to the table. The high seasoning with cayenne is characteristic of Victorian game cookery, which treated pepper and pungency as the proper foil to the strong, dark flesh of moorland birds.