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Snipes, Raised Pie, Hot
Take four snipes, pluck and singe them, and cut them in two lengthwise. Carefully remove the gizzards with the point of a knife, put the trails aside till wanted, and season the birds with salt and cayenne. Fry the birds in a saucepan with a little clarified butter till they are set; they will take about ten minutes. Drain them, and put them in a cool place till wanted. Make a little forcemeat as follows. Cut four ounces of calf's liver and four ounces of fat bacon into dice. Melt the bacon in a saute-pan over a brisk fire, add the liver, and season the mixture with salt, pepper, and a pinch of aromatic powdered herbs. When the bacon and liver are cooked, put them aside till cold, then pound them till smooth in a mortar; add, whilst pounding, the trails of the birds, and press the paste through a sieve. Butter a moderate-sized pie-mould, line it evenly with crust (see PASTE FOR RAISED PIES), and put a layer of the forcemeat in the bottom of the mould, taking care to leave it hollow in the centre. Put half the pieces of snipe in a circle upon the forcemeat, and place a little ball of forcemeat between them to keep them in position. Spread a layer of forcemeat upon them, put in the rest of the birds, and put a layer of forcemeat over all. Fill the hollow in the centre of the pie with bread which has been covered with fat bacon, put the pastry-cover on, pinch the edges of the pie securely, brush the top over with egg, and bake in the oven. When done enough, take off the cover, remove the bread, and fill its place with scalloped truffles. Pour a little good brown sauce over all pile truffles on the top, and serve. The brown sauce may be made as directed in
A late-Victorian raised game pie, built cold and baked hot. The recipe assumes you know how to make hot-water paste and how to run an oven by feel, so both need filling in.
- The hinge: fry only until setThe ten minutes in clarified butter is meant to firm the flesh and colour it, not to cook it through. The birds finish in the pie, and snipe carried past medium turn dry and livery.
- Sourcing snipeSnipe are legal quarry in Britain in season but are almost never sold; in the United States migratory game birds cannot be sold at all, so wild snipe means a hunter's freezer. Farmed quail are the practical stand-in — four quail for four snipe, split lengthwise the same way.
- The trailsSnipe and woodcock were traditionally cooked undrawn, the intestines being considered a delicacy; only the gizzard is removed. Here the trails go into the forcemeat, which is where their flavour belongs. If the birds have already been drawn, add another ounce or two of liver instead.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A raised pie of this size wants a hot start to set the crust, around 425F for the first fifteen minutes, then 350F for the remaining hour or so, until the centre reaches 165F. Tent the top with foil if it colours too fast.
- Bread and bacon in the centreThis is a support, not a filling — it holds the crust up and keeps the cavity open while the pie bakes, in the same way baking beans do. It is discarded before serving.
- Aromatic powdered herbsA Victorian kitchen standby: a dried blend, the versions in print running to some combination of thyme, marjoram, bay, basil and sometimes a little mace or clove. A pinch of quatre-épices or a mixed dried herb blend with a scrape of mace does the job.
- Truffles"Scalloped" means cut in thin slices. Fresh black truffle at this quantity is now a luxury far beyond what it was in the book's own day; sliced sautéed cremini or a spoonful of truffle-scented mushroom duxelles keeps the intention without the cost.
- Brown sauceThe cross-reference is to the book's own brown sauce, a brown roux with veal or beef stock in the espagnole family rather than necessarily the full classical version. A well-reduced game or veal jus, lightly thickened, is the modern equivalent.
- YieldFour snipe in a raised crust serves four as a main course, or six to eight sliced as a first course. It also cuts far more cleanly after resting twenty minutes.
Raised pies — the free-standing kind built in a mould from stiff hot-water paste — are among the oldest surviving forms in English cookery, descended from the medieval "coffyn" whose thick crust was a baking vessel first and food second. By the time Cassell's compiled this dictionary in the late nineteenth century the crust had become edible and the pie a set-piece of the game season, its interior carefully layered so that a cut section showed a pattern. Snipe were a genuinely fashionable bird then, prized for their small size and strong flavour and, like woodcock, traditionally cooked with the trail left in; the practice is generally explained by the bird's habit of feeding on soft invertebrates, so that its intestines were held to be clean enough to eat. The elaborate assembly here — forcemeat of calf's liver and bacon, a bread core to hold the dome, truffles added at the last minute — belongs to the same professional Anglo-French tradition that produced Gouffé and Francatelli, written for a household with a cook and a larder rather than for a family kitchen.