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SNIPES, ROASTED (another way)
Pluck, singe, and draw the snipes, remove the gizzards, and carefully preserve the trails. Truss the birds, cover them with thin slices of fat bacon, and tie these on securely with twine. Put the snipes down before a clear fire. Take a slice of the crumb of bread for each, and toast and butter it on both sides. Chop the trail, spread it on the toast, and put the slices in a brisk oven. Take the birds up, and serve them on the slices of toast in a hot dish. Time to roast, twenty to twenty-five minutes.
A straightforward game-bird roast that assumes an open fire and a bird small enough to cook through in twenty minutes. The trail is the point of the dish, so handle it first.
- The trail"Trail" means the intestines, which in snipe and woodcock are traditionally kept and eaten; only the gizzard is discarded. Chop it, spread it on the buttered toast, and let it cook through in the oven while the birds finish — it should set to a dark savoury paste, not stay wet.
- Brisk ovenRead that as a hot oven, roughly 400-450F. The recipe does not say how long the toast stays in; a few minutes, long enough to cook the trail and crisp the bread edges, is the sense of it.
- Roasting without a fireTwenty to twenty-five minutes applies to a bird cooked before a clear fire, radiant heat on one side at a time. In a hot oven the same snipe will likely be done in appreciably less, perhaps 12-15 minutes; the breast should be pink and the legs loose.
- Barding baconThin fat bacon or, better, unsmoked pork fatback. Modern streaky bacon is cured and smoked heavily enough to bully a bird this small, and it needs to be sliced very thin or it will not render in the time available.
- SourcingSnipe is rarely seen in shops. In Britain a licensed game dealer may supply it in season; in the United States sale of wild-shot game birds is not permitted, so it reaches the kitchen through a shooter. Common snipe and Wilson's snipe are quarry species in Britain and North America respectively, but jack snipe is protected in Britain and several relatives are protected elsewhere — confirm what you have before plucking it.
- ShotWild-shot birds carry pellets. Feel along the breast and thighs before cooking, and warn anyone at the table.
- SubstitutesQuail is the practical stand-in for size and cooking time, though quail have no trail worth keeping; use a little chicken liver mashed with butter on the toast instead. Woodcock behaves almost identically to snipe and is treated the same way.
- YieldTwo birds per person as a main course, one as a first course or savoury, each on its own slice of toast.
Snipe belongs to the small class of birds that English cookery treated as too delicate to gut, alongside woodcock and larks: the trail was regarded as the finest part, and roasting the bird whole over toast so that the juices soaked the bread is a long-established practice of uncertain date. Cassell's gives it under roasting because that is where snipe's whole reputation lay — the flesh is dark, iron-rich and almost fatless, so it wants fast radiant heat and a jacket of bacon rather than any sauce or stuffing. The bird's popularity in Victorian and Edwardian kitchens says something about the period's shooting economy: snipe came from marsh and moor in autumn and winter, arrived at the game dealer by the brace, and turned up as often as a savoury at the end of dinner as it did as a main course. Marsh drainage and changing game laws have since made it a rarity on the table, and the trail, once the best of it, no longer holds the place it once did.