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Woodcock, Potted
Take any number of fresh woodcocks. Pluck them carefully, and cut off their legs and wings. Split the birds in halves, and lay them on a dish. Take away the gizzards with the point of a knife, and with this exception, leave the inside or trail undisturbed. Line the inside of an ordinary potting-pan with thin slices of fat bacon. Fill it with the woodcocks placed neatly and closely in layers upon the bacon, and season each layer with salt and black pepper. When the pan is full, pour over the woodcocks as much clarified butter as will cover them, and cover the pan with a coarse paste of flour and water. Make a hole in the centre of the lid, and bake the woodcocks in a moderate oven. They must not be eaten till they are quite cold. When a skewer can be pushed easily to the bottom of the pan, the woodcocks are sufficiently baked.
This is a potted preserve, not a dish for the table that evening, and the method it relies on is one that modern food safety has ruled out. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- The undrawn trail is the central problemThe recipe deliberately leaves the intestines in place, removing only the gizzard. Intestinal contents carry Salmonella, Campylobacter and clostridial spores directly into the meat, and here that meat is then sealed away from air under fat. Game cookery of the period treated woodcock trail as a delicacy; it is not a risk anyone can measure or control at home.
- An anaerobic butter seal with no measured processClarified butter poured over meat and set solid creates a low-oxygen environment. Clostridium botulinum spores survive baking temperatures and germinate in exactly those conditions if the pot is held anywhere near room temperature. The recipe gives no salt weight, no curing agent, no internal temperature and no storage instruction beyond "quite cold."
- No temperature and no doneness test worth the name"a moderate oven" in a coal range is usually reckoned as something in the region of 350F, though the term was approximate and never a measured setting. The only doneness check offered is whether a skewer slides to the bottom of the pan. That measures tenderness in the pot, not whether the deepest layer of bird ever reached a safe temperature under a blanket of butter and a flour-and-water lid.
- The flour-and-water lid is not a preserving sealThe "coarse paste" with a vent hole is a baking device: it holds steam in and lets pressure escape. It was never a sterile closure, and nothing about it makes the contents shelf-stable.
- SourcingWoodcock is a wild game bird and cannot legally be bought in the United States; in Britain and Europe it can be bought in season from game dealers, subject to close seasons and hygiene rules. "Any number of fresh woodcocks" assumed a shooting household or a game merchant of a kind now uncommon in most places.
- If you want the dishUse a current, tested recipe for potted game or a game terrine, with drawn birds, a stated internal temperature and refrigerated storage with a defined keeping time.
Potting was the English larder's answer to a glut: meat or game baked down in a covered pot, packed tight, and sealed under a layer of clarified butter that kept air out and let the pot sit in a cool pantry for weeks. Woodcock and snipe were the classic exceptions to the rule that birds are drawn before cooking, the trail being prized for its flavour and traditionally served spread on toast beneath the roasted bird; this recipe simply carries that convention into the potting-pan. The instruction that they "must not be eaten till they are quite cold" is the giveaway that this is a preserve rather than a dinner, and it reflects how routine such keeping methods were in a house with a game bag and no refrigeration. The fat bacon lining served the same purpose it does in a modern terrine, protecting the meat at the walls of the pot from the direct heat of the oven.