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Woodcock, Salmi Of
Take the remains of cold dressed woodcocks, and cut off the meat in neat pieces. Place these in a covered dish, and put them aside till wanted. Remove the gizzards from the trail, then chop them fine, and mix with them a spoonful of bread-crumbs, a small slice of butter, and a spoonful of chopped parsley. Put this also aside. Scrape a carrot, and put the pulp into a saucepan with two shallots, two cloves, a bunch of sweet herbs, six peppercorns, and half a dozen mushrooms, if liked; but these may be omitted. Pour over the ingredients a pint of gravy, and let them simmer for an hour. Strain the liquor, and free it entirely from fat. Bruise the bones and trimmings of the woodcocks, put them into the strained liquor, and simmer till the former are quite clean. Take the bones out, and send the gravy and the little pieces of meat that are in it through a sieve, and add a glassful of sherry or Madeira. Put the pieces of woodcock into a saucepan, pour the gravy over them, and let them heat gently by the side of the fire. Of course, they must not boil. Toast one or two slices of crumb of bread, and divide them into five or six pieces of the shape of a heart. Spread the minced trail upon them, and put them in a hot oven for a few minutes. Place the pieces of woodcock on a dish, pour the sauce over them, and garnish with the heart-shaped croutons. Time, two to three hours.
A second-day dish built on the carcasses of roast woodcock, and one that stands or falls on temperature control. Everything here is already cooked; the work is in the gravy.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe bird meat goes into the finished sauce only to warm through, held beside the fire, well below a simmer. Woodcock breast is lean and already roasted; a hard boil will toughen and dry it.
- Sourcing the birdWoodcock cannot legally be sold in the United States and is hard to buy in Britain outside a game dealer's season, so this is a recipe for someone who has been given birds. Roast snipe, quail, squab or partridge behave the same way and the method transfers intact.
- The trailThe trail is the intestine and associated offal left inside the bird during roasting — traditional with woodcock and snipe, which are cooked undrawn; here the gizzard is picked out of the trail afterwards. It emerges from the oven already cooked, so the chopped mixture on the croutons needs only a few minutes in a hot oven to crisp the toast and set the butter.
- GizzardsThey are removed because they hold grit and stay tough; discard them rather than mincing them into the spread.
- MeasuresA pint of gravy is 20 fl oz British, 16 fl oz American — either works. A "glassful" of sherry or Madeira in Victorian usage means a wine glass, roughly 2 to 2.5 fl oz. "A spoonful" is most likely a tablespoon, though the book does not say.
- Scraped carrot"Scrape a carrot" may mean scraping the skin clean or scraping the raw flesh to a pulp; either way the carrot goes in for sweetness and is strained out later. Grating on the coarse side of a box grater does the same job.
- Simmer the bones till cleanThis means until the connective tissue has released and the bones slip bare; the recipe gives no time for this stage, only two to three hours overall. Then press the solids through a fine sieve so the shreds of meat clinging to them enrich the sauce. Do not push through splintered bone; a chinois or two layers of muslin is safer.
- Degreasing"Free it entirely from fat" is easier if the strained stock is chilled and the cap lifted off, which also means the sauce can be made a day ahead.
- YieldThe five or six croutons suggest two or three servings, which is about right for the meat off two or three woodcock.
Woodcock held a peculiar place in nineteenth-century British cookery: a migratory wading bird taken in late autumn and winter, prized above almost all other small game and customarily roasted undrawn, so that the trail could be caught on toast beneath the spit. Cassell's places this among the salmis, a French preparation — from salmigondis, a hotchpotch — in which already-roasted game birds are jointed and finished in a rich reduction of their own bones and trimmings with wine. The salmi had a name as a restaurant dish, but in the domestic dictionary it does honest second-day work: nothing of a bird as valuable as a woodcock was thrown away, and the heart-shaped croutons are a common Victorian garnish for game, cut from crumb rather than crust so they take the sauce without going leathery.