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Moor Came, Roasted
Cut off the head, wipe out the inside, and truss like a fowl. Plenty of butter to baste, and a quick fire are indispensable. If overdone, moor game are spoiled. Serve them on buttered toast soaked in the dripping-pan, with plain melted butter poured over them, or, if preferred, a gravy and bread sauce. The delicious aroma of the moor fowl is lost if other seasoning than pepper and salt be given it. Fine bread-crumbs, toasted with butter to a light brown, should accompany this dish. Time, half an hour or more. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. to 3s. 6d. the brace. Sufficient, two for a dish.
"Moor game" is red grouse, and this is the standard Victorian treatment: high heat, hard basting, almost no seasoning. The single instruction that matters is the warning against overdoing it — grouse has almost no fat and turns dry and livery the moment it passes pink.
- Quick fire means 425-450FQuick fire means a fierce heat -- The recipe assumes a brisk fire before an open grate, with a dripping-pan beneath; the book states no temperatures. The usual modern equivalent is a hot oven, roughly 425-450F. Grouse wants that heat so the skin colours before the breast dries out.
- Half an hour is the outer limitA red grouse weighs about 12-16 oz oven-ready and is generally roasted 20-25 minutes, to a breast temperature around 130-135F, then rested. The book's "half an hour or more" is longer than modern practice; taken literally it risks exactly the spoiled bird the recipe warns against.
- A brace is two birdsGame was sold and given in pairs, and a brace is traditionally said to be one cock and one hen tied together. The stated cost of 2s. 6d. to 3s. 6d. the brace fits the book's likely date in the 1870s-80s. "Sufficient, two for a dish" means the pair makes up one dish.
- Truss like a fowlLegs drawn in and tied against the body, wings folded back. With the head off, the bird is short and compact and will cook evenly; untrussed, the legs finish long before the breast.
- Barding is assumedBarding helps in an oven -- Roasting of this kind was done before an open fire with continuous basting, which is what the recipe calls for; it says nothing of barding. In an oven, lay a thin sheet of pork fat or streaky bacon over the breasts for the first two-thirds of the time and remove it to brown, or the constant basting the recipe demands becomes constant oven-door opening.
- The toast is part of the methodA slice of buttered toast goes under the bird in the pan so it absorbs the drippings — and in older practice the trail, the bird's intestines, which were considered a delicacy. Modern cooks generally discard the innards and set the toast under the bird for the last ten minutes.
- Melted butter is a sauce"Plain melted butter" in nineteenth-century English cookery means a thin butter sauce thickened with a little flour and water, not simply clarified butter. Poured over, it keeps the lean flesh from tasting dry.
- Fried crumbs, not breadcrumb coatingThe "fine bread-crumbs, toasted with butter to a light brown" are served loose in a small dish alongside, to be spooned over. They accompany roast game the way bread sauce does, and both are still standard with grouse.
Red grouse, Lagopus lagopus scotica, is peculiar to the British and Irish uplands and has never been successfully farmed, which is why Victorian cookery books treat it as a luxury priced by the brace rather than by the pound. The shooting season opens on 12 August — the "Glorious Twelfth", a date generally traced to game legislation of the early nineteenth century — and the railways made it possible for birds shot on a Yorkshire or Perthshire moor in the morning to reach London restaurants within a day or two, which is roughly when grouse became a fashionable metropolitan dish rather than a local one. The insistence here that nothing but pepper and salt should touch the bird is characteristic of English game cookery of the period: heather-fed grouse was prized precisely for a flavour thought too distinctive to be sauced, and the fried crumbs and bread sauce are there as neutral foils rather than seasonings. The lesson of the entry is the technique rather than the ingredient: lean wild birds, a fierce fire, and relentless basting.