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WOODCOCK PIE (to be eaten cold)
Line the edges of a dish with good puff-paste. Put at the bottom a slice of lean veal well seasoned with pepper, salt, and pounded mace, and on this place a slice of thin lean ham. Pluck four woodcocks carefully, so as not to injure the tender flesh. Do not open them, but season with pepper, salt, and mace, and cover them with layers of bacon. Pack them closely into the dish, and fill up the empty spaces with hard-boiled plovers' or hens' eggs. Pour over all a pint of strong beef gravy, so strong that it will jelly when cold, and cover the dish with pastry. Brush it over with egg, ornament it, and place in the centre two or three of the feet nicely cleaned. Bake the pie in a well-heated oven, until the pastry is done enough. A woodcock pie is considered a rare delicacy, though it is rather an expensive one. Time to bake the pie, an hour or more. Probable cost, uncertain,
A Victorian raised game pie of the grandest sort, and one that cannot simply be scaled down and cooked tonight. The obstacles are legal and biological before they are culinary.
- Woodcock cannot be boughtWoodcock cannot simply be bought -- The American woodcock is a migratory bird protected under federal law: it may not be sold or bought commercially, and possession is tied to licensed hunting in season. The Eurasian woodcock remains legal quarry in Britain within a defined season and can be had from game dealers there, but it is a wild bird in limited supply rather than a routine market item. Readers in the United States have no lawful route to four of them.
- Plovers' eggs are off the tableLapwing (green plover) eggs were a luxury of exactly this period and were collected in enormous numbers. Taking them has been prohibited in Britain since the mid-twentieth century, and wild birds' eggs generally are protected. The recipe's own alternative, hens' eggs, is the only one that still exists.
- The birds are left undrawn"Do not open them" is deliberate: woodcock are traditionally cooked with the intestines in, and the pie encloses four whole undrawn birds under bacon, sealed in pastry, for an hour. The centre of a packed, gravy-filled pie under a lid does not reliably reach a temperature that makes gut contents of a wild bird safe, and the pie is then held and eaten cold.
- Cold storage was a different thingThe dish is meant to be eaten cold, set in the jelly its own strong gravy forms. A pie of wild game and stock, cooled slowly in its own mass, is the kind of environment food-safety practice was written to prevent. If you want a cold raised game pie, work from a current recipe with stated internal temperatures.
- What the terms mean"Puff-paste" here lines only the rim; the recipe otherwise relies on the dish itself and a pastry lid, and gives no crust for the body. Pounded mace is the ground aril, the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, aromatic but distinct from nutmeg itself. "A pint" in this book is the imperial 20 fl oz, not 16.
- "Strong beef gravy" is not gravyIt means a reduced brown stock made from bones and shin, concentrated until it sets firm when cold on its own gelatin; the recipe's own test is that it 'will jelly when cold'. Modern commercial stock generally will not set.
- "A well-heated oven"The book gives no temperatures; this means a hot oven, with the understanding that a coal range fell steadily through the bake. The hour given is judged by the pastry -- 'until the pastry is done enough' -- not by the contents.
- Scale and costFour birds, veal, ham, bacon, a pint of reduced stock and a full pastry lid make a substantial pie for a cold table. The "probable cost, uncertain" suggests woodcock had no fixed market price.
Woodcock held a peculiar place in British game cookery: it is one of the very few birds traditionally cooked undrawn, on the old belief that the bird feeds so cleanly on worms taken by probing soft ground that its "trail" is fit to eat, spread on toast set beneath the roasting bird. That practice is what lies behind the flat instruction here not to open them. Cold raised game pies of this kind belonged to the Victorian sideboard and the shooting luncheon, set in their own jelly; the two or three cleaned feet planted in the crust are a known convention, a maker's mark declaring what was inside before anyone cut it. Cassell's, compiled for large middle-class households in the last decades of the century, calls the dish a rare but expensive delicacy, which is why the entry ends by shrugging at the price.