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Ptarmigan, Roasted
Hang the birds as long as possible. Pluck and draw them carefully, and truss like grouse. Baste liberally, and just before they are done enough flour and froth them nicely. Serve very hot, either on fried bread-crumbs or on buttered toast, and send brown gravy and bread sauce to table with them. Time to roast, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. each. Sufficient, two for a dish.
A late-Victorian game roast written for cooks who bought birds in the feather and knew what "frothing" meant. The instructions are sound, but almost every step assumes knowledge the entry does not spell out.
- The hinge: do not overcookPtarmigan is very lean and dries out fast, and half an hour is a short roasting time, consistent with a hot oven. The book gives no temperature and says nothing about how pink the breast should be. In modern terms, roast at around 425F and pull the birds when the thickest part of the breast reads about 135-140F, then rest ten minutes; past 150F the meat turns liver-dry and grainy.
- "Hang as long as possible"Victorian game was hung in the feather in a cold larder, often for a week or more, to develop flavour and tenderness. Modern practice is a few days at 34-40F in a refrigerator, and birds sold today have usually been hung by the dealer already. Anything hanging in a warm kitchen is spoiling, not ripening.
- Flour and frothNear the end of roasting, dust the breasts lightly with flour, spoon over hot butter or dripping, and return them briefly to the oven so the coating puffs into a crisp, blistered surface. It is a browning and crisping step, not a thickener.
- Drawing and trussingDraw means to remove the innards. Some small game birds were traditionally roasted undrawn, though this entry explicitly directs that ptarmigan be drawn carefully. Truss as for grouse: legs pressed close to the body and tied, wings folded back, a bard of bacon or a butter-soaked cloth over the breast for the earlier part of the roasting.
- BastingWith no fat cover of its own, the bird needs help. Baste every seven or eight minutes with butter or bacon fat, or set it on a rack over a little water so the drippings do not scorch.
- If you cannot get ptarmiganPtarmigan is a wild grouse of high, cold ground and today is largely a hunter's or specialist dealer's bird, though the price quoted in the entry shows it was a purchasable bird in the book's own day. Red grouse or partridge behave the same way in the oven; a poussin or Cornish hen will match the size and timing but not the flavour.
- Fried bread-crumbs and brown gravyThe crumbs are coarse breadcrumbs fried golden in butter, spread on the platter to catch the juices. Brown gravy is best made here from the roasting juices with a little stock; Victorian brown gravies were often thickened and browned with flour, but a light one suits the bird. Bread sauce is milk infused with onion and clove, thickened with soft breadcrumbs.
- Cost and yieldThe price in shillings is meaningless now beyond signalling that these were expensive birds. Two ptarmigan make a dish for two hearty eaters, or four at a table with several other courses.
Ptarmigan (Lagopus muta) is a grouse of the high, bare tops, in Britain confined to the Scottish Highlands, where it turns white in winter. The name comes from the Gaelic tàrmachan; the silent initial p was added by later writers on the mistaken assumption of a Greek root, a spelling that stuck. Cassell's places the bird in a long run of game entries because the Victorian dinner table ran on the shooting calendar: grouse from the Twelfth of August, then partridge, pheasant and the hill birds, all treated by broadly the same method of hard roasting, frothing, and a garnish of fried crumbs with bread sauce. Ptarmigan was generally reckoned among the scarcer and costlier of the group, both because it lives above the heather line and because its flesh is often said to carry a faint bitterness from the mountain shoots and lichens it feeds on.