Home › The Principles of Cookery › Snipes, Roasted, with Truffles
Snipes, Roasted, with Truffles
Pluck, truss, and roast the snipes in the usual way with slices of buttered toast under them. When done enough, take them up, and put inside each bird one or two truffles which have been stewed in brown sauce. Send the sauce which remains to table in a tureen, and serve very hot.
A three-line recipe that assumes a Victorian cook already knows how to handle a snipe. Almost everything that matters is hidden in the phrase "in the usual way."
- "The usual way" means undrawnSnipe, like woodcock, were traditionally roasted whole with the intestines left in, the head skinned and the long bill run through the thighs as a skewer. Only the gizzard was removed. The trail melts out onto the toast beneath, which is the whole point of the toast.
- If that is not for you, draw themA drawn snipe is a perfectly good bird; it simply loses the savoury paste on the toast, which many Victorian eaters would have counted a loss. Nothing in the roasting changes.
- Heat and timeNo temperature or time is given. In modern terms a hot oven, around 425-450F, suits. A snipe weighs only a few ounces and takes roughly 8-12 minutes; anything longer dries the breast to nothing. Period sources generally have such birds served underdone.
- Brown sauceThis means espagnole or a well-reduced game stock thickened with brown roux, not the bottled condiment of the same name. A reduced stock made from the necks and any trimmings, finished with a little butter, does the job.
- TrufflesBlack truffle is the likely intention, gently warmed in the sauce rather than boiled so it perfumes without collapsing. Preserved truffle in a jar is the realistic substitute, and was itself common at the time; truffle oil is not, as it will not survive the sauce.
- The toastCut it to the size of the bird, butter it, and set it in the pan under the snipe from the start so it catches every drop. Serve each bird on its own slice.
- SourcingSnipe is legal game in season in Britain and North America but rarely sold retail; a game dealer or a shooting friend is the practical route. Quail is the nearest available stand-in, though it has none of the same flavour.
- YieldTwo birds per person for a main course, one as a savoury or first course. Serve on hot plates: a 4 oz bird loses its heat in under a minute.
Snipe held a place in Victorian cookery out of all proportion to its size, prized alongside woodcock as the finest of the small game birds and, like woodcock, cooked undrawn on the grounds that the bird's diet of worms and soft mud left nothing offensive inside. The long, straight bill is used here as a trussing skewer; the English verb to snipe is generally traced to the difficulty of shooting so erratic a flier. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, issued in parts from the mid-1870s for a middle-class household with servants and later reissued in revised form as the New Dictionary of Cookery, includes a number of snipe recipes; this one is the grand version, dressing a wild bird with truffles and espagnole in the French manner that dominated ambitious English dining after Careme and Soyer. The pairing of game and truffle is generally traced to the kitchens of Perigord and the Perigueux sauce named for them, and by the late nineteenth century it signalled luxury as reliably as caviar would later.