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Snipes, Pudding of, Superior
Take four or six fresh snipes, pluck them, and cut them in halves. Take away the gizzards with the point of a knife, but put the trails aside till wanted. Season the birds with salt and black pepper; a few drops of lemon-juice may be sprinkled over them or not. Cut a Spanish onion into dice, put it into a saucepan which has been rubbed quickly round with garlic, and fry it in butter till it begins to turn yellow. Dredge a table-spoonful of flour upon it, and add a table-spoonful of chopped mushrooms, a table-spoonful of minced parsley, and a pinch of aromatic powdered herbs (see HERBS, AROMATIC, POWDERED). Stir these ingredients over the fire, and moisten them with half a pint of wine, or with stock flavoured with wine. Boil all for ten minutes, add the trails, and rub the sauce through a sieve. Line a pudding-basin with thin suet crust, put in the birds, pour the sauce over them, and add three or four sliced truffles if liked. Cover the pudding with pastry, press the edges closely together, and boil or steam it in the usual way. Turn out carefully, and serve. Time to boil the pudding, two hours and a half. Six birds will be sufficient for a good-sized pudding.
A Victorian game pudding: seasoned snipe under a suet crust, with a rich sauce built on the birds' own trails. The technique transfers well to other small birds, but the sourcing is the first hurdle.
- Sourcing the birdsSnipe is legal quarry in Britain in season and is sold by game dealers, but in the United States it is a migratory game bird that cannot be bought or sold at all — only taken by a licensed hunter, and the same applies to woodcock. Quail or small partridge behave much the same in a pudding; allow about the same total weight, roughly 1 to 1½ lb of dressed birds.
- The trails"Trails" are the intestines, traditionally left in snipe and woodcock; the usual explanation given is that the birds' gut is largely empty. Only the gizzard is picked out. They are simmered into the sauce and sieved, and give the dish much of its character; leave them out and you have a plainer game pudding.
- Half a pint of wineAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or 1¼ US cups. A dry red or a madeira-style fortified wine both suit the sauce; if using stock "flavoured with wine", figure on about two-thirds stock to one-third wine.
- Aromatic powdered herbsCassell's own mixture, a dried blend along the lines of thyme, marjoram, savory, bay and basil ground fine. A pinch of poultry seasoning or herbes de Provence, crushed, stands in without argument.
- The suet crust and basinA pudding basin is a deep heatproof bowl; for six birds allow about 2 to 3 pints. Line it with the crust rolled to a scant ¼ inch, leaving enough overhang to seal against the lid of pastry, then cover with pleated parchment and foil tied down so no water gets in.
- Boiling or steaming"In the usual way" means the basin sits on a trivet or folded cloth in a pan of simmering water reaching two-thirds up the sides, topped up from a kettle as it falls. Two and a half hours is for the crust, not the birds — small game will be entirely soft and falling from the bone by then, which is what the dish intends.
- TrufflesThree or four sliced fresh truffles is an extravagance even by the book's standards. A single small preserved truffle, or a spoonful of its juice, reads the same way in the finished sauce.
- BonesHalved snipe are served on the bone, and the bones are fine and sharp. Warn the table, or bone the birds out after the initial seasoning and before they go into the crust.
- YieldSix birds in a good-sized basin serves four generously as a main course, with the crust doing most of the work of filling people up.
History: Cassell's dictionaries of cookery ran through several editions from the 1870s into the early twentieth century, and the date of this one is not firmly established; the milieu is one in which British game cookery and French sauce-making were being spliced together for middle-class households with a cook and access to a game dealer. Snipe were plentiful, and the convention of leaving them undrawn — the trails spread on toast, or as here worked into a sauce and sieved — is an old one, usually explained by the bird's habit of feeding on soft invertebrates rather than grain, so that the gut is clean. Encasing the whole thing in suet crust and boiling it for hours is the older, plainer English half of the dish: the boiled pudding suited kitchens that had a fire and a cauldron more reliably than a good oven, and it persisted in cookbooks like this one long after ranges had improved.