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Landrail, or Corn-Crake, to Roast
This delicious bird, which is in full season at the end of August and the beginning of September, should be trussed like a snipe, with the head under the wing, and a skewer passed through the thigh and the body, to keep the legs straight. Fasten two or three slices of bacon over the breast, and roast before a clear fire. Dish it on fried bread-crumbs, or, if preferred, omit these and pour a small quantity of brown gravy into the dish with it, and send more to table in a tureen. Bread sauce should also be sent to table with it. Time to roast, from fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, uncertain, corn-crakes being seldom offered for sale. Sufficient, three or four for a dish.
The corncrake is no longer a game bird in any practical sense: it is one of the most sharply declined breeding birds in Britain and Ireland and is legally protected. The recipe is printed here as a record of Victorian table practice, not as something to cook.
- The bird is protectedThe corncrake (Crex crex) is a red-listed species in the UK and protected under wildlife legislation there and across the EU; it is an offence to kill, take, sell or possess one. The same protection applies to its eggs and nests.
- Cassell's own note is the clue"Probable cost, uncertain, corn-crakes being seldom offered for sale" tells you the bird was rarely a market commodity, though that need not mean it was already scarce in the countryside. Mechanised mowing of hay meadows, which destroys nests and chicks, is generally held responsible for the collapse that followed.
- No substitution is being offeredSmall roast game birds are handled differently enough that a current, properly tested recipe for whatever bird is legally available to you is the right source. This entry is not a template to adapt.
- Landrail is the same bird"Landrail" was the ordinary English name for the corncrake, a rail of hay meadows rather than of water. Both names appear interchangeably in Victorian sporting and cookery writing.
- Trussed "like a snipe"Head under the wing, a skewer through thigh and body to keep the legs straight, and the bird roasted before an open fire rather than in an oven. The fifteen to twenty minutes given is for radiant heat from a clear fire.
- Fried bread-crumbsCrumbs fried in butter or in the pan drippings, served under the bird, were a usual Victorian accompaniment to small roast game; here they are an alternative to brown gravy poured into the dish, with bread sauce sent to table in either case. Crumbs, bread sauce and gravy still accompany roast pheasant and partridge today.
The corncrake was once so common in British and Irish hay meadows that its rasping two-note call, heard through summer nights, was a byword for country noise; it appears in game lists, sporting diaries and cookery books throughout the nineteenth century as a small bird ranked with the snipe and the quail. Cassell's places it among the roasts of late August and early September, the weeks when the birds were fat before migration. Mowing, brought forward and speeded up by machinery through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is generally held responsible for the bird's near-disappearance from most of Britain and Ireland: nests and flightless chicks are destroyed before the young can leave. The entry's own remark that corncrakes were "seldom offered for sale" reads now less like a note on price than an early notice of loss, and the species is today the object of targeted conservation schemes in the Hebrides and western Ireland rather than of recipes.