Home › The Principles of Cookery › ROOK PIE (another way)
ROOK PIE (another way)
Skin and draw six young rooks, and cut out the backbones. Season the birds with pepper and salt, put them in a deep dish with half a pint of water, lay some bits of butter over them, and cover the dish with a tolerably thick crust. Let the pie be well baked.
A plain suet-crust game pie of the kind that appeared every May in English farmhouses. Two things decide whether it is edible: getting rid of the back and the skin, and giving the birds long enough under the crust to become tender.
- Sourcing and legalityRooks and other corvids are wild birds, not a market item, and the rules on taking them differ by country and change often; in Britain they fall under general licences with conditions attached, and in the United States most corvids are protected. Anyone tempted to try this needs to check current law before anything else, and in practice the recipe works with squab or quail.
- Skin, do not pluckThe instruction to skin rather than pluck is deliberate. The skin and the fat beneath it carry most of the rank, oily flavour, so it is stripped off whole rather than plucked.
- Why the backbone comes outThis is the hinge of the dish. The back and spine of a rook were traditionally held to be bitter, and many versions of the pie use only the breasts and legs. The recipe here removes the backbone but otherwise puts the birds in whole; taking out the rib cage as well does no harm.
- "Young rooks"The pie was made from branchers, birds a few weeks old that have left the nest but not yet flown properly. An adult rook is tough and strong-tasting and will not become tender in the time given here.
- Half a pint of waterAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups; an American half pint is 8 fl oz. Either is enough with six small birds, which give up a good deal of their own liquid. Stock in place of water improves it considerably.
- "A tolerably thick crust"The recipe does not say what the paste is. In a book of this date a thick pie crust laid over a deep dish would most often be a suet or plain water paste rather than a rich short one; rolled fairly thick, perhaps a quarter-inch, and sealed to the rim, it steams as much as it bakes and stands up to the liquid underneath.
- "Well baked"No temperature is given because none could be. As a modern starting point, begin hot enough to set the pastry, around 425F for the first 15 minutes, then drop to about 325F and give it long enough -- an hour and a half or so -- for the leg meat to soften, judging by the meat rather than the clock. Cover the crust with foil if it colours before the birds are done.
- SeasoningPepper and salt alone is spare even by the standards of the period. A number of rook pie recipes add a few rashers of bacon or slices of beefsteak under the birds, both for fat and to fill out the gravy.
- YieldSix young rooks yield very little meat, perhaps a pound off the breasts and legs together. Reckon it as a supper for four with vegetables.
Rook pie was a seasonal fixture rather than a delicacy: rookeries were culled in May, when the branchers were fat and easy to shoot, and the birds went straight into the kitchen because there was nothing else to do with them. The dish belongs to the same economy as blackbird pie and sparrow pudding, in which a farm's pest control fed the household. Cassell's includes it in its usual encyclopaedic spirit, giving several versions of a country recipe that a London reader would almost certainly never cook, down to the terse instruction to cut out the backbones. Rook pie persisted in parts of rural England well into the twentieth century, and is still cooked occasionally as a curiosity.