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Pheasant, Boiled
Pick, draw, and singe the pheasant, and truss it firmly, as if for boiling. Cover with buttered paper, wrap it in a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and after it has once boiled up draw it to the side, and let it simmer as gently as possible until it is done enough. The more gently it is simmered the better the bird will look, and the tenderer it will be. Put it on a hot dish, pour a small quantity of sauce over it, and send the rest to table in a tureen. Celery sauce, horse-radish sauce, oyster sauce, white sauce, soubise sauce, or even plain onion sauce, may all be served with boiled pheasant. Time to boil: half an hour from the time of boiling, for a small young bird; three-quarters of an hour for a larger one; one hour or more for an old one. Probable cost of pheasants, about 3s. each when in full season. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A gentle poach rather than a boil, and the distinction is the whole recipe. Cassell's assumes a bird bought in feather, so the first half of the work happens before any water is involved.
- Never let it boilAfter the initial plunge and one boil-up, the water should sit at a bare shiver, with no rolling bubbles (roughly 175-185F on a modern thermometer). Hard boiling tightens the breast muscle and shreds the skin; the original's promise that the bird will look better and eat tenderer for gentle handling is accurate.
- The cloth and the buttered paperThe buttered paper keeps the breast from drying and the floured cloth holds the trussed shape and blocks the water from leaching flavour and colour. A double layer of parchment tied with kitchen string, then a clean cotton tea towel, does the same job. Muslin alone is too open.
- "Done enough"Judge by temperature, not the clock: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone. Pheasant is very lean and goes from moist to cottony within minutes of overcooking, so start checking early.
- Revised timingsThe half hour, three-quarters and "one hour or more" reflect wild birds of unknown age. A modern farmed pheasant of 2-2.5 lb is usually done in 30-40 minutes of gentle simmering. Reserve the full hour for a genuinely old wild cock bird, which will still be sinewy.
- Picking, drawing, singeingPlucking, gutting and burning off the remaining hair-fine feathers over a flame. If you buy the bird oven-ready this is all done; a gas burner or kitchen torch will deal with any stubble that remains.
- Season the waterThe recipe says only "boiling water." Add salt, an onion, a carrot, a few peppercorns and a bay leaf. The bird gives up little to the pot through the cloth, but the resulting liquor is the natural base for the white, celery or onion sauce that follows.
- Cost and yield"About 3s. each" is a late-Victorian shilling price and means nothing today. Three to four servings is realistic if the bird is carved and sauced; two if you are treating each half as a portion.
- Sauce order of operationsMake the sauce while the bird poaches, thinning it with the poaching liquor at the end. A poached pheasant will not hold well in a warm oven, so everything else should be ready when it comes out of the cloth.
Boiling — properly poaching — was a common Victorian treatment for a bird whose age or toughness made roasting a gamble, and it kept a lean carcass from drying out. The technique is transferable: much the same buttered paper, floured cloth and barely-trembling water were used for boiled fowl, boiled turkey and boiled capon. The list of sauces — soubise, oyster, horse-radish — suggests a kitchen with staff and a range in steady use. Pheasants were relatively plentiful in season on estates and in city game shops, though 3s. a bird was no trifle; the British shooting season runs from the start of October to the beginning of February, which is what "in full season" means here. The bird itself is not native to Britain; its introduction is often attributed to the Romans, with large-scale rearing for sport a much later development.