Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Woodcock, Devilled
Divide a brace of under-done woodcocks into neat joints, and season the pieces with a savoury powder made in the proportion of a tea-spoonful of salt to a tea-spoonful of curry-powder, a tea-spoonful of cayenne, and a dessert-spoonful of mushroom-powder. Split the heads, take out the brains and put them in a basin with the trail, the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, the grated rind of half a lemon, a pinch of pounded mace, and a table-spoonful of soy. Rub the mixture with the back of a wooden spoon till it is smooth, and add the juice of two Seville oranges, a table-spoonful of ketchup, and a glassful of Madeira or sherry. Put the sauce with the birds into a silver dish over a spirit lamp, stir occasionally, and simmer gently till it is very hot and the flesh has become thoroughly impregnated with the liquor. Stir in quickly a dessert-spoonful of salad oil, and serve immediately.
This is a chafing-dish supper dish from the era when game was hung, roasted rare and finished at the table. Several elements of it cannot be reproduced safely or, in many places, legally, and the points below explain what the text is asking for rather than how to do it.
- The birds are never cookedThe recipe starts with woodcock deliberately roasted under-done and then only warms the jointed pieces in sauce over a spirit lamp until "very hot". Wild birds routinely carry Campylobacter and Salmonella, and a gentle simmer in a shallow metal dish gives no assurance that the interior of the joints ever reaches a safe temperature.
- Trail and brainsThe "trail" is the woodcock's intestine, traditionally left in the bird and eaten. Raw or barely warmed gut contents are among the highest-risk parts of any bird, and the brains go into a cold sauce base which the recipe then only simmers "gently till it is very hot" — no assurance that the material reaches a safe temperature. There is no version of this step that is sound by current practice.
- About the printed warningThe BSE notice at the head of the text is a blanket caution attached to any recipe using nervous-system tissue. It does not apply here in a literal sense — woodcock are not cattle and BSE is a bovine disease — but the underlying point stands that brain tissue is not a food to handle casually, and the bacterial risk in this dish is real regardless.
- Legality and supplyWoodcock are protected migratory birds. In the United States they may not be sold, and in Britain they may only be taken in a short shooting season, so supply is seasonal and largely outside ordinary retail. A "brace" is two birds.
- Lead shotLead shot in small birds fragments, and fragments are easily missed when a bird is jointed and served in a sauce. A further reason the dish belongs to history rather than to a modern table.
- Vocabulary in the textMushroom-powder is dried mushrooms ground fine, a Victorian savoury seasoning; "soy" means soy sauce, an import; "ketchup" here is mushroom or walnut ketchup, thin and dark, not tomato; Seville oranges are the sour marmalade variety, in season only in midwinter. A "glassful" means a wine glass, and period wine glasses were smaller than modern ones.
- If you want a devilThe seasoning idea — salt, cayenne, curry powder, citrus, fortified wine — transfers perfectly well to thoroughly cooked poultry or game. Use a current recipe with stated temperatures and leave the trail and brains out.
"Devilling" — reheating cooked meat, bones or game in a fiercely hot, spiced sauce — was one of the great habits of the nineteenth-century English table, and it came to be closely associated with the late-night chafing-dish supper: a silver dish, a spirit lamp, cayenne, soy and a glass of Madeira, assembled in front of the guests after cards or the theatre. Woodcock was the aristocrat of the small game birds, prized on the strength of a sporting tradition that held its gut to be simple enough that it was conventionally roasted ungutted and the trail served spread on toast, a practice Cassell's takes entirely for granted here. The Seville oranges and the mushroom powder date the dish as much as the spirit lamp does: both were standard store-cupboard sharpeners in a period before bottled sauces had consolidated into a handful of brands. What the recipe really records is a moment when the cook's skill was expected to be performed at the table, and when the rarest possible game bird was thought to need nothing more than heat, acid and pepper.