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WILD FOWL (Hunter's fashion)
Roast the fowls before a clear fire, baste liberally, and take them up whilst they are still decidedly underdone. Send them to table very hot with rich brown gravy in a tureen. Put near the carver a silver dish which can be placed over a spirit lamp. Put into this dish a spoonful of Harvey's sauce, two glassfuls of port, two glassfuls of gravy, the strained juice of a lemon, and a little salt and cayenne. Mix the sauce thoroughly, cut the fillets from the breast of the fowls, and the slices from the sides; put these into the gravy. Heat the whole over the spirit lamp, and serve very hot. Time, a minute or two to heat the fillets in the sauce. Our American cousins dissolve a little black currant jelly in the sauce thus prepared for wild fowl. Probable cost of wild fowl, very uncertain.
This is a tableside salmi in all but name: the birds are roasted rare, carved at table, and the slices barely warmed in a hot wine sauce. The hinge is the second heating — a minute or two, no more, and the sauce must never boil once the meat is in it, or lean wild duck turns grey and stringy.
- Which birds"Wild fowl" in a Victorian English cookery book means wild duck — mallard, widgeon, teal — and occasionally snipe or plover. A mallard serves two, a teal one; scale the sauce accordingly. Farmed duck is far fattier and behaves differently under high heat.
- Before a clear fireA spit in front of a hot, flameless bed of coals. The book gives no temperature and no roasting time. As a modern approximation, a short blast in a hot oven — around 425-450F, perhaps 18-20 minutes for a mallard and 8-10 for teal — will leave the breast rosy. The birds are meant to come out visibly underdone because they finish in the sauce.
- GlassfulA wine glass in this period is about 2 fl oz, so two glassfuls of port is roughly half a cup, and the same again of gravy. The sauce is deliberately thin and sharp, not a reduction.
- Harvey's sauceA commercial anchovy, soy and vinegar sauce of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the bottled sauces of the same family that Worcestershire belongs to, and now effectively gone from shops. Worcestershire is the closest standing substitute, used in the same small quantity — a spoonful, not more.
- Spirit lamp and silver dishA chafing dish over a small alcohol burner. Any wide, shallow pan over a table burner or a very low ring does the job; what matters is gentle heat and a broad surface so the slices warm through without stewing.
- The gravyThe 'rich brown gravy' is a separately made brown gravy, not pan drippings; wild duck yields almost no fat or juice. It cannot come from these birds' carcasses, which are still at table, so giblets and trimmings would be the usual basis. The recipe assumes it is made in advance and kept hot before the birds come up.
- CarvingFillets from the breast means the two whole breast lobes, sliced thin on the bias; the "slices from the sides" are the strips along the ribs and thigh. Legs of wild duck are tough and are traditionally kept back for grilling or a devilled dish.
- ShotWild-shot birds carry pellets. Run a finger over the breast before carving and warn anyone at the table; lead shot is also a reason to avoid pounding or mincing the meat and carcass indiscriminately.
- The American variationBlackcurrant jelly dissolved in the sauce — about a teaspoon — softens the port and lemon considerably. Redcurrant works the same way and is easier to find.
- YieldTwo mallard prepared this way, with the sauce as given, serve four as a main course.
This is the chafing-dish end of Victorian game cookery, closely related to the French salmis, in which roasted game birds are taken up underdone, carved, and finished in a wine sauce built from the carcasses. Cassell's frames it as "Hunter's fashion," a name that flatters the shooting-party dinner rather than describing anything done in a field; the silver dish and spirit lamp are drawing-room equipment, and the point of the method is spectacle — the carver working in front of the guests, the meat going into the sauce at the last moment. Harvey's sauce, which the recipe assumes is in every store cupboard, was one of the great proprietary bottled sauces of the period, sold from the late eighteenth century and imitated endlessly before Worcestershire displaced it. The closing note that "our American cousins" add blackcurrant jelly is a small piece of period observation, though redcurrant with venison and duck had long been familiar in Britain. The refusal to quote a price — "very uncertain" — is honest about a market that depended entirely on what had been shot that week.