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Woodcock, with Oysters
Pick, draw, and wipe a brace of woodcocks; beard eighteen oysters and cut them in quarters. Mix two ounces of bread-crumbs with the yolks of three eggs, a quarter of a gill of cream, and one ounce of butter; add a few drops of lemon juice, a pinch of ground mace, and pepper and salt to taste; mix with the oysters, and stuff the birds with this; sew up and truss for roasting. Put the birds in a roasting tin with a little dripping, and bake in a quick oven from thirty to forty minutes, basting occasionally. When done, untruss, dish up on two pieces of toasted bread, and serve with a good brown sauce.
A late-Victorian game roast that reads oddly today: the stuffing is essentially a rich oyster forcemeat, and it, not the bird, dictates the cooking time. Read the timing note before you commit to a whole woodcock.
- Sourcing the birdsA brace is two birds, and small ones. Wild woodcock cannot legally be sold in the United States and is only occasionally available from licensed game dealers in the UK and Europe; quail or squab of similar size take the stuffing and the roasting time in much the same way.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F.
- A quarter of a gillA gill is 5 fl oz in British measure, so a quarter gill is 1.25 fl oz, some 2 to 2.5 tablespoons of cream. Two ounces of breadcrumbs is roughly a cup if the crumbs are taken as fresh rather than dried.
- Beard the oystersBearding means trimming off the dark frill of gill tissue around the edge of the shucked oyster, which stays tough. Quarter the trimmed meats as directed.
- The timing is the problemThirty to forty minutes at that heat will take small game birds well past dry. The stuffing contains raw egg and raw shellfish, so it does need to reach 165F in the centre. Cook to the stuffing with an instant-read thermometer rather than to the clock, and accept that the breast will be fully cooked, or stuff and bake the mixture separately and roast the birds 18-20 minutes.
- Sewing upA trussing needle and butcher's twine, or two or three cocktail picks laced across the vent, will hold the forcemeat in.
- Brown sauceThe book means espagnole or a reduced game stock thickened with brown roux, not bottled brown sauce. Deglaze the roasting tin with stock and a splash of madeira if you are not making the full sauce.
- YieldTwo birds on two rounds of toast, so two servings as a main course, four as a first course if each bird is halved.
Woodcock was among the most prized birds on the Victorian game list, and cookery writers of the period often recommended it be roasted undrawn, the trail left inside to melt onto the toast beneath. The recipe here takes the plainer line, drawing the birds and filling the cavity with an oyster forcemeat instead. The toast under the bird is the older survival, and it persisted in game cookery long after it vanished elsewhere.