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WOODCOCK PUREE (for patties, croustades, etc.)
Take the remains of cooked woodcock. Pick the flesh from the bones, and put the skin, bones, and trimmings into a saucepan, pour over them a little stock or water, and add a shallot, a small piece of celery, a sprig of thyme, and three or four peppercorns. Let the gravy simmer gently till it is strong and good. Mince the flesh finely, and pound it in a mortar with a spoonful of stock and a little piece of butter. When reduced to a pulp, rub it through a hair sieve. Strain the stock, free it entirely from fat, and boil till it is considerably reduced. Season with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, and mix with it double the quantity of white sauce. If this is not at hand, a quarter of a pint of cream and a small spoonful of flour will answer the same purpose. Put the pulp into the sauce, stir it over the fire till it is hot, and it will be ready for use. Time, an hour and a half or more to simmer the bones. Probable cost, uncertain.
A leftovers recipe in the old style: the bird is already roasted, and the point is to extract every last bit of value from carcass and scraps. Two things govern the result — a genuinely strong stock, and a purée that is never allowed to boil once it goes into the sauce.
- Sourcing the birdWoodcock cannot legally be bought in the United States; it is a migratory game bird taken only under licence in season. In Britain and Ireland it is sold in season by game dealers. Failing that, the method works with the remains of roast quail, squab or wood pigeon, though the flavour is milder and less iron-edged.
- The hinge — do not boil the puréeThe flesh is already cooked. Once the pulp goes into the sauce it needs only to be brought up to serving heat, a minute or two over gentle heat. Boiling tightens the fibres and turns the smooth purée grainy, and it will dull the gamey aroma that is the whole reason for making it.
- Quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. The "small spoonful of flour" is roughly a rounded teaspoon — enough to bind that quantity of cream to a coating consistency.
- "Double the quantity of white sauce"Double the volume of the reduced stock, not of the meat purée. Reduce the strained bone stock to two or three tablespoons and you will want four to six tablespoons of white sauce — a plain béchamel or velouté made with some of the game stock.
- Mortar and hair sieveA small food processor does the pounding in seconds; add the stock and butter to help it turn over. The sieving is not optional if you want the texture patties call for — push the paste through a fine drum sieve or a conical strainer with the back of a ladle to catch shot, sinew and shreds of skin.
- Simmering timeAn hour and a half is generous for the bones of a single small bird. Forty-five minutes to an hour will extract most of what there is. Keep it at a bare tremble and skim.
- Degreasing"Free it entirely from fat" matters more than it sounds, because the stock is then reduced hard and any fat left behind concentrates with it. Chill the strained stock and lift the set fat off, or blot the surface with paper.
- The trailWoodcock is traditionally roasted undrawn, and the intestines — the trail — are spread on toast beneath the bird. If your remains include trail, mash it into the purée; it is the most intensely flavoured part. If the bird was drawn, the purée will simply be leaner in taste.
- YieldOne woodcock yields only a few tablespoons of meat pulp; with the sauce, enough to fill perhaps four to six small patty cases or croustades as a savoury or first course. Two birds make a more useful quantity.
Cassell's places this among the "remains" recipes that run through every large Victorian household manual: a roast game bird came to table whole, and what came back to the kitchen was expected to reappear as a patty, a croustade filling or a savoury. Woodcock (Scolopax rusticola) was among the most prized birds on the British game list, valued for its dark, almost liver-like flesh and traditionally roasted undrawn so that the trail could be caught on toast beneath it — a practice generally traced to the belief that the bird feeds only on worms and clean earth. Because a woodcock is a small bird, well under a pound, there was never much meat to begin with, which explains both the elaborate salvage of skin and bones for stock and the frank note that the "probable cost" is uncertain: the bird came from a shoot or a game dealer, not from a price list. The croustade and patty-case format belongs to the same period's fondness for the savoury course, a small, highly seasoned mouthful served after the sweet at dinner.