Roast Woodcock
Pluck the woodcocks carefully, neck and head as well. Do not open them, but truss them securely. Roast in a hot oven, flour them, and baste liberally with dripping or butter. Dish them with a piece of toast under each, and garnish with watercresses. Send melted butter or orange gravy to table in a tureen. It is an improvement to cover the woodcocks with slices of bacon before putting them down to the fire, and, when they are to be had, two or three vine-leaves may be laid under the bacon. Time to roast the woodcocks, if liked underdone, fifteen to twenty minutes; if liked well-dressed, twenty-five to thirty minutes. Sufficient, two for a dish.
A very short Victorian game recipe that assumes a spit or open fire and a cook who knows that woodcock are roasted whole and undrawn. The timings are the part most worth attention.
- "A hot oven"Read this as 425-450F. Small birds want fierce heat for a short time so the skin colours before the breast overcooks.
- Undrawn on purpose"Do not open them" is not carelessness. Woodcock are traditionally roasted with the intestines in place, the trail melting into the toast beneath; only the gizzard is ever taken out. Anyone uncomfortable with that should draw the bird and accept a plainer result.
- Head and beakThe head is left on and the long beak is often used as the skewer, passed through the thighs to truss the legs. The brain is eaten and was prized.
- TimingFifteen to twenty minutes gives a pink breast, which is how the bird is served today. Twenty-five to thirty minutes, the book's "well-dressed" option, will leave the meat dry and livery; the modern default is the shorter time, then five minutes' rest.
- Flour and basteDredge lightly with flour after the birds go into the heat, then baste every few minutes with butter or beef dripping. Without basting, birds this lean go leathery.
- Bacon and vine-leavesThe barding bacon should be fatty and unsmoked; today's heavily smoked streaky will bully the flavour. Vine-leaves means grape leaves -- brined ones from a jar, rinsed, work in place of fresh.
- Melted butter and orange gravy"Melted butter" here is the period drawn-butter sauce, not simply butter in a jug. Orange gravy is game stock or pan juices sharpened with the juice and shredded zest of a Seville or bitter orange.
- SourcingWoodcock is a hunted migratory bird and hard to come by in the market; in the United States its sale is prohibited, so it comes only from a hunter and only in season.
- Yield"Sufficient, two for a dish" gives two birds to a dish, which probably reckons a bird apiece with its toast.
Woodcock (Scolopax rusticola in Britain, the smaller Scolopax minor in North America) held an odd rank in nineteenth-century cookery: a wild bird available to a country household in autumn, yet treated with the ceremony reserved for delicacies. The convention of roasting it undrawn, with the trail allowed to drip onto toast, was already old when this book was compiled, and is generally explained by the bird's diet of earthworms and its habit of voiding itself readily -- an explanation repeated so often in game cookery that it should be taken as tradition rather than fact. The trussing with the beak, the barding bacon and the vine-leaf were all standard practice for small game birds roasted before an open fire, where the vine-leaf caught the fat and kept the bacon from scorching. Shot birds were an ordinary part of the domestic larder between October and January, and a cook was expected to know what to do with whatever came in from the field.