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Woodcock, Stuffed and Roasted
Pluck and draw two woodcocks. Remove the gizzards, then mince the trail finely with half its weight in fat bacon, and add a dessert-spoonful of chopped parsley and a little pepper and salt. A little very finely-minced shallot may be added, if liked. Truss the woodcocks, and roast them in the usual way. Send them to table with gravy in a tureen, and serve the trail on toast round them.
A short entry that assumes you have the bird whole, feathered and undrawn, and that you know what to do with its innards. Two points need untangling before anything else: what the trail is, and how the recipe means you to cook it.
- The trail is the hinge"Trail" is the woodcock's intestine, kept because tradition held that a bird feeding on worms carries no coarse matter in its gut. The gizzard is removed because it does hold grit; everything else is minced. If the idea does not appeal, the birds roast perfectly well without it.
- Where the trail actually goesThe title says stuffed, the text says only to mince the trail with bacon and later "serve the trail on toast." One reading is that the mixture goes back inside the bird and is scraped out onto fried bread when carving; the text does not say so. Cooking the mince separately in a small pan is the simpler reading.
- Roast "in the usual way"The book gives no temperature or time. Modern practice for a bird of 6 to 8 oz is a hot oven, roughly 425F, for 15 to 20 minutes, breast barded with bacon or brushed with butter. Woodcock is customarily served pink; longer cooking dries the breast.
- Do not draw the birds earlyWoodcock are hung undrawn and are best dressed the day you cook them. Pluck dry rather than scalding, and take care with the skin, which is thin and tears.
- TrussingThe classic method is to skewer the bird with its own long beak through the thighs. A short metal skewer or a loop of butcher's twine does the same job of holding the legs close to the breast.
- MeasuresA dessertspoonful is about two teaspoons. "Half its weight in fat bacon" means half the weight of the trail, so a very small amount; use unsmoked streaky or fatback so the bacon does not dominate.
- GravyThe recipe specifies only that gravy is passed separately in a tureen, not how it is made; a thin brown gravy from the pan juices would suit. Deglaze the roasting tin with a little stock if you wish, and pass it separately, as instructed.
- Sourcing and yieldWoodcock cannot legally be bought in the United States, where it is hunted under season and bag limits only; in Britain and Ireland it is sold in season through game dealers. Two birds serve two people, one each, with toast.
Woodcock held a peculiar rank in nineteenth-century English cookery: it was among the few birds routinely cooked undrawn, on the belief that its diet of earthworms left the gut clean enough to eat, and the trail on toast was treated as the best part of the dish rather than a thrifty extra. Cassell's carries an entry on it at a time when snipe and woodcock arrived at table whole, beak-trussed, as a savoury course or a light supper dish for two. The instruction here to remove the gizzard but keep the trail is the conventional compromise of the period, and the addition of bacon fat and shallot reflects the general late-Victorian drift of English game cookery toward French seasoning. Woodcock has since become far scarcer on menus, partly through declining numbers and shortened shooting seasons, and partly because the taste for whole small birds and their offal receded in the twentieth century.