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Pheasant, Roast
Pluck, draw, and singe a brace of pheasants, wipe them with a dry cloth, truss them firmly, and either lard them or tie round the breasts a slice of fat bacon. Flour them well, put them before a clear fire, and baste liberally. When they are done enough, remove the bacon, serve the birds on a hot dish, and garnish with watercress. Send good brown gravy and bread sauce to table with them. If the fashion is liked, half a dozen of the best of the tail-feathers may be stuck into the bird when it is dished. Time, three-quarters of an hour to roast a good-sized pheasant. The drumsticks are excellent when devilled. Sufficient for four or five persons.
This is spit-roasting written for an open fire, and the two things that need translating are the heat source and the fact that pheasant is far leaner than chicken.
- A braceTwo birds, the standard unit for sold game. An oven-ready pheasant runs about 2 to 2 1/2 lb; the stated yield of four or five people assumes two birds and side dishes.
- Fire to oven"Before a clear fire" means a bright, flameless bed of coals with the bird turning on a spit and a dripping pan beneath. The book gives no temperature; a hot oven of roughly 400F is a reasonable modern stand-in, with the birds on a rack over a tray.
- The hinge: keep the breast coveredThe barding bacon or larding fat is not decoration. Pheasant breast has almost no intramuscular fat and goes dry and stringy quickly, so leave the fat on for all but the last 10 minutes, then remove it to let the skin colour.
- TimingThree-quarters of an hour is about right for a 2 1/2 lb bird at 400F, but oven-reared pheasants vary a great deal in size. Judge by the thigh reaching 165F, then rest the birds 10 minutes breast-down before carving.
- Flouring and bastingThe flour dusting is close kin to the Victorian "frothing" trick, though frothing was usually a final dredge and baste: the flour absorbs the basting fat and crisps into a coat. It works in an oven too, but only if you baste with hot fat every 10 minutes or so, otherwise the flour just sits there pale.
- Pluck, draw, singeAssume this is done for you. If you are working from a bird in the feather, it should be hung by the neck in a cool airy place first — a few days in modern taste, longer in Victorian taste, which liked game distinctly high.
- AccompanimentsThe recipe asks only for "good brown gravy"; a roast gravy from the pan drippings and giblet stock suits the dish, though period brown gravies were often thickened with browned flour. Bread sauce — milk infused with onion and clove, thickened with fresh crumbs — is standard with roast game in this tradition; it does the work of a starch on the plate.
- Devilled drumsticksThe leg meat is tough and worth treating separately. Devilling means scoring the drumsticks, coating them with mustard, cayenne and butter, and finishing them under fierce heat — a second meal from the same birds.
Cassell's gives roast pheasant a notably plain treatment, and by the later nineteenth century the bird had become the centrepiece of the British shooting season, reared in large numbers on estates and sent to market as a matter of course. Pheasants are not native to Britain; they are generally traced to introductions from Asia, with widespread rearing for sport dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The instruction to stick tail feathers into the dished bird — offered here with visible reserve, "if the fashion is liked" — belongs to the older tradition of serving game recognisably as itself, and bread sauce and watercress were a common accompaniment set for roast game birds of the period. That the drumsticks get their own sentence tells you something about how these households ate: nothing on a game bird was expected to go to the stockpot without first being tried at table.