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Pheasant, Stuffed and Roasted
Pick, draw, and singe the pheasant, truss it as for roasting, and fill it with a forcemeat prepared as follows. Wash the liver of the bird, and fry it in hot fat until it is done enough; mince it finely, pound it in a mortar, and mix with it two table-spoonfuls of grated bread-crumbs, a dessert-spoonful of finely-minced ham, three mushrooms chopped small, a minced shallot, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, a little pepper and salt, and half an ounce of fresh butter. Mix these ingredients thoroughly, and bind them together with the yolk of an egg. Cover the breast of the bird with thin slices of fat bacon tied on securely with twine, and roast before a clear fire. When it is done enough, serve the pheasant on a hot dish, with a sauce, prepared as follows, in a tureen. Put a table-spoonful of olive-oil into a stewpan with six raw button mushrooms, a clove of garlic, two shallots, and half a tea-spoonful of capers, all finely minced. Add four cloves, a bay-leaf, a small sprig of thyme, another of parsley, and half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, and stir these over a gentle fire for five or six minutes. Pour over these ingredients two table-spoonfuls of stock and a glassful of sherry, and simmer very gently for fifteen minutes. Remove the cloves, the herbs, and the garlic, pour in two spoonfuls more of stock, simmer five minutes longer, and skim the sauce carefully. Rub it through a fine hair-sieve, add a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice, heat the sauce once more, and it is ready for serving. If preferred, three or four tomatoes may be added to this sauce. They should be simmered with the other ingredients until they can be pressed through a sieve. Time to roast the pheasant, three-quarters of an hour or more, according to the size; three-quarters of an hour to prepare the sauce. Probable cost of pheasants, 3s. each, when plentiful. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A standard Victorian roast game bird with a liver forcemeat and a sharp sherry-and-mushroom sauce. Nearly everything translates directly; the main work is converting spit-roasting to an oven and keeping a lean bird from drying out.
- The hinge: don't overcook the breastPheasant has very little fat and goes dry and stringy fast. Roast to 160-165F in the thickest part of the breast and rest it 10 minutes; the bacon barding is not decoration but the only thing standing between the breast and leather.
- Fire to oven"Roast before a clear fire" means turning on a spit with a dripping pan. In an oven, 400F for a bird of about 2-2 1/2 lb, roughly 45-50 minutes barded, with the bacon removed for the last 10 minutes to colour the skin.
- Spoon measuresVictorian spoons run a little smaller than modern ones and a dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons. A "glassful" of sherry here means a wineglassful, conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz rather than the contents of a modern wine glass; a dry sherry (amontillado or fino) suits the sauce better than a sweet cream sherry.
- Picking, drawing, singeingPlucking, gutting, and burning off the remaining hairs and pinfeathers over a flame. A butcher or game dealer will do all three; if you buy the bird oven-ready, keep the liver if it comes with it, or substitute a chicken liver.
- Forcemeat textureThe mortar-pounded liver is essentially a coarse pate. A short pulse in a food processor gets there faster, but stop before it turns to paste or the stuffing sets dense.
- Stuffing and safetyA stuffed bird takes longer at the centre than an empty one. Check the forcemeat itself reaches 165F, or bake it separately in a small dish alongside and spoon it out at the table.
- Straining the sauceA hair sieve was horsehair mesh; a fine nylon or steel conical strainer does the same. Press hard on the solids to get the mushroom body through, then reheat without boiling once the lemon juice is in.
- YieldThree to four as written is optimistic for a modern table unless the bird is large. Allow one pheasant for two good appetites, or serve it carved with the sauce as one course among several.
Cassell's appeared when pheasant was the most domestic of British game birds: introduced centuries earlier, thoroughly naturalised, and by the late nineteenth century reared in huge numbers on estates for driven shooting, which is why a dictionary of cookery could quote a price "when plentiful." The treatment here is French in method and English in ambition -- a liver forcemeat bound with egg yolk, a barded breast, and a sauce built on shallot, mushroom, capers, and sherry that may owe something to the sauce families codified by Careme and his successors, though that is an inference from method rather than a documented lineage. The optional tomatoes are a mark of the date: tomatoes had moved, over the second half of the century, from a suspect novelty to an increasingly familiar thickener and souring agent in English sauce-making, though still one noted as an option, as the recipe itself does. Hanging game before cooking was standard then and largely a matter of taste now, but the barding is not optional in either era, since a wild bird carries almost no fat of its own.