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Ruffs and Reeves
These little birds, of which the ruff is the male and the reeve is the female, take their name from the long feathers which stand round the neck of the male bird, in appearance slightly resembling the ruffs worn by ladies. Ruffs are birds of passage, and are caught in traps, and when fattened on meal and milk are esteemed a great delicacy. They should not be drawn, and should be trussed like woodcock. To prepare them, run a small skewer through the thighs and pinions, lay over the bodies of the birds a slice of fat bacon and a vine-leaf, run them on a lark-spit, and put them down before a clear fire. Baste well with butter, and put a slice of toast in the tin under the birds to receive the drippings from the trail. When done enough, dish them on the same toast with a little brown gravy under them, and more in a tureen. Garnish the dish with water-cress, and send bread sauce to table. Time to roast the birds, ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, uncertain, ruffs being seldom offered for sale.
This is a working recipe, but its central ingredient is no longer obtainable in law or in practice, and nothing in the method can be substituted around that.
- The bird is protectedThe ruff (Calidris pugnax) is a wild bird protected in Britain under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which protects wild birds generally and gives the ruff additional special protection; it is also covered by international migratory-waterbird agreements, though a few European states still permit limited hunting. Taking, killing, selling or possessing one in Britain is an offence, which is why the dish cannot lawfully be made here.
- Trapping and fatteningThe recipe assumes birds caught alive in traps on their passage and then penned and fattened on meal and milk. Both the trapping of wild waders and the keeping of them for the table are now prohibited, quite apart from the conservation status of the species.
- "Should not be drawn"Like woodcock and snipe, these birds were roasted with the intestine — the "trail" — left in, so that it melted out onto the toast beneath. That practice puts uncooked gut contents into food that is never brought to a safe temperature. The soaked toast was traditionally held to be as prized as the bird itself.
- No sound substituteQuail, squab and other farmed small birds are lawful and available, but they are drawn, differently sized and differently fatted, and the whole point of the method here is the untouched trail. A current recipe written for the bird you actually have is the sensible route.
- Vocabulary, for readingA lark-spit is a slender spit strung with several small birds at once; pinions are the wing joints; the tin is the dripping-pan set below the spit before an open fire. "Send bread sauce to table" means serve it separately rather than poured over.
- "Probable cost, uncertain"Cassell's gives a probable cost for almost every entry, so this admission is telling: by the time the book was compiled, ruffs were a curiosity rather than a market bird.
Ruffs took their name from the extravagant breeding plumage of the male, a feathered collar long likened to the starched ruff of Elizabethan dress; the female, plain by comparison, is the reeve. Fenland England once trapped them in numbers on spring and autumn passage and fattened them in pens on bread, milk and meal — a fattening trade generally traced to Lincolnshire and the Norfolk marshes, and one that, with drainage and shooting, helped end the ruff's career as a regular British breeding bird by the middle of the nineteenth century. That collapse is written into the entry itself: by the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary the birds were "seldom offered for sale", and the recipe survives as a record of a vanished fen delicacy rather than a dish anyone was expected to cook. The method — undrawn, spitted with bacon and a vine-leaf, the drippings caught on toast — is the standard treatment for woodcock and snipe, and shows how the small-wader cookery of the period was essentially one technique applied to whatever the marsh yielded.