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Rook Pie
Rooks require long stewing, or they will not be tender. The breasts are the only parts of the birds which are really worth using, and when the other portions are put into the dish, care should be taken to cut out the spine and the flesh near it to the width of three-quarters of an inch, or the pie will have a bitter taste. Many cooks lay the birds in a dish, season them with pepper and salt, put a coarse flour-and-water crust over them, and then bake them for a couple of hours; the next day they remove the common crust, lay good pastry over them, and bake the pie in the usual way. The following recipe will, however, be found very good. Take six or eight freshly-killed young rooks. Skin without plucking them, and to do this cut the skin round the first joint of the legs, and draw it over the head. Cut off the necks, draw the birds, and cut away the legs, backs, and wings. Cut a pound of chuck steak into neat squares, pepper these, and lay them in a pie-dish, pouring over them half a tea-cupful of stock or water; cover the dish closely, and bake the meat till it is almost done enough. Lay the breasts of the rooks upon the steak, with a small slice of butter upon each. Sprinkle over them a seasoning of salt, pepper, and pounded mace, and pour over them as much stock or water as will barely cover them. Let them bake gently for half an hour. Let the dish cool, then line the edges with good pastry, cover it with the same, ornament according to taste, make a hole in the centre that the steam may escape, and bake in a brisk oven. When the pastry is done enough, the pie may be served. Time to bake, altogether, two hours and a half. Probable cost, uncertain, rooks being seldom sold. Sufficient for five or six persons.
The technique here is sound old-fashioned pie work, but the main ingredient is the problem: rooks cannot lawfully or practically be obtained for the table in most places today.
- The birds are protectedThe rook (Corvus frugilegus) is a wild bird protected under the UK Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981; rooks appear on general licences only for purposes such as crop and livestock protection, not for taking birds for the table. In North America native corvids fall under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, though crows are subject to regulated hunting seasons in many states. Shooting a nestful of "young rooks" for a pie is not something a modern cook can straightforwardly or lawfully do.
- No substitute is being offeredSquab, pigeon and other dark-breasted birds are sometimes suggested as stand-ins, but the timings, the bitter-spine problem and the pre-baking sequence here are all pitched at rook. If you want a game pie, use a current recipe written for the bird you can actually buy.
- Why only the breastsThe instruction to cut out the spine and the flesh near it, to a width of three-quarters of an inch, is the hinge of the whole dish. Corvid backbone and the dark flesh against it were held to carry a persistent bitterness that no amount of mace or butter covers, which is why rook recipes tend to reduce to breast meat alone.
- "Skin without plucking"Rooks were skinned rather than plucked because the skin itself was held to be rank. The method described — cutting round the leg joint and drawing the skin off over the head — is the same glove-peeling technique still used on small game.
- The two-day crustThe alternative method mentioned in passing, a coarse flour-and-water crust baked over the birds for two hours and discarded the next day, is what is elsewhere called a huff paste: a sacrificial lid that seals in steam and is thrown away, with good pastry laid on afterwards. The same device turns up for other things that needed longer cooking than pastry can survive.
- Reading the oven directionsFor context rather than practice: the book gives no temperatures, but 'brisk' is conventionally glossed today as roughly 425-450F and 'gentle' as around 300-325F. The two and a half hours quoted is stated as the total across all the bakings, not the final one.
- "Probable cost, uncertain"The book's own note that rooks were seldom sold suggests this was not a market dish. The likely route into the kitchen was a shoot on the property, which is precisely the situation that no longer applies.
Rook pie belonged to a fixed point in the English rural calendar: the rook shoot of mid-May, when the year's young birds — "branchers", just out of the nest and clambering about the rookery — were shot from below, partly to keep the colony in check on farmland and partly because that was the only moment they were considered fit to eat. The pie was the standard way of using the resulting glut, and it survived in country-house and farm kitchens well into the twentieth century, often with beef in the dish to give the thin breast meat body and fat, as here. Cassell's includes it not as a delicacy but as a piece of practical household reference: an editor compiling a dictionary of cookery in the 1870s and after had to account for whatever a rural cook might be handed, and the flat admission that the cost is "uncertain, rooks being seldom sold" marks it as estate food rather than shop food. The wider taste for small wild birds — larks, plovers, thrushes as well as rooks — was ordinary in Victorian Britain and has since been closed off by both law and appetite.