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Prairie Hens
Prairie hens may be treated either like a fowl or like a pheasant. The insides must be washed, and a rinse with soda or potash is a good sweetener. If prepared like a fowl, the usual adjuncts are required; if like a pheasant, a brown sauce, with a little claret, and a dash of orange-or lemon-juice, is a good accompaniment. The bird is improved by larding, and should be well basted. Time to cook, an hour or more, according to size. Probable cost, uncertain.
This is a reference entry for a wild American game bird that a Victorian British kitchen would have received in a hamper of imported game. Two things in it put it out of reach today: the bird itself and the cavity rinse.
- The bird is protected"Prairie hen" means the greater prairie chicken (Tympanuchus cupido) and its relatives. The eastern subspecies, the heath hen, was extinct by 1932; Attwater's prairie chicken is federally endangered; the greater prairie chicken survives on fragmented grassland and is hunted only under tightly limited seasons and permits in a handful of states, and not at all in most. Wild birds cannot legally be sold as meat in the United States, and bringing one into Britain or the EU as game is not realistically possible under current wildlife and veterinary rules.
- The potash rinsePotash is potassium carbonate, a strongly alkaline non-food chemical. Rinsing a body cavity with it to "sweeten" gamey flesh turns up in nineteenth-century cookery writing; it is caustic to tissue, can leave residue in the meat, and has no place in a modern kitchen. The "soda" offered as the alternative here is unspecified — period recipes may mean washing soda (sodium carbonate) as readily as bicarbonate — and neither does anything useful.
- "Sweetener" is a warning signThe rinse appears to be aimed at a bird that has hung until it is high. Victorian game was commonly hung well past what would now be thought safe, and period sources do recommend alkali or vinegar washes to counter the result. Whatever the reason for the instruction, it is not a food-safety standard anyone should follow.
- If you want to cook game birdsUse a current recipe for a legally sourced farmed or licensed wild bird, with a thermometer and a stated internal temperature. This entry gives no oven heat and no doneness test at all, only "an hour or more, according to size."
- Reading the termsFor reference: "treated like a fowl" means cooked as for a chicken, roast or boiled, with whatever accompaniments that implies; the entry does not spell out what "the usual adjuncts" are. Larding is threading strips of pork fat through lean flesh with a needle, the standard remedy for a bird with almost no fat of its own.
- "Probable cost, uncertain"Cassell's normally gives a probable cost for a dish; here it declines to name one. That the compiler could not price the bird is consistent with a supply that reached the market irregularly, though the entry does not say so.
Prairie chickens were once so abundant on the American tallgrass prairie that market hunters shipped them east by the barrel through the 1870s and 1880s, packed in ice or frozen solid. Whatever the route by which the bird became known to British compilers such as Cassell's, the price is given as uncertain: supply was erratic and the birds arrived in unpredictable condition, hence the advice about sweetening the insides. The trade collapsed with the population. Ploughing of the prairie, uncontrolled shooting, and the loss of the lekking grounds where the males boom in spring reduced a bird counted in the millions to scattered remnants within two generations, and the heath hen of the eastern seaboard was gone entirely by 1932. The entry is a small record of a food that was cheap because it seemed inexhaustible.