New Orleans Way to Cook Snipe
Mrs. Cuthbert Slocum
Take some jelly made of calf's feet and madeira wine. A small piece of salt pork and a piece of liver. Chop the meat up fine, with seasoning of salt, red and black pepper. Put a few soda crackers in the oven and toast and pulverize them. Mix them with your chopped meat. Add chopped truffles and mushrooms, and just enough meat juice to soften it. Cut your snipe in two. Put them in a china tureen and fill in the empty places with this hash. Put it on a very slow fire for several hours, basting it with the jelly.
A slow, luxurious braise for little game birds, bedded in a savory hash and cooked for hours beneath a glossy madeira jelly.
- Calf’s-foot jelly decodedThis is a gelatin-rich stock set firm from simmering calf’s feet — a Victorian staple. Substitute rich stock with a little unflavored gelatin (or a spoon of demi-glace), flavored with madeira.
- Madeira wineMadeira is a fortified Portuguese wine; a dry or medium style lends the recipe’s signature nutty depth, and dry sherry is a fair stand-in.
- Soda crackers as binderToasted, crushed soda crackers thicken the hash; crushed saltines or oyster crackers do the same today.
- The truffle-and-mushroom hashChopped salt pork, liver, and mushrooms make a forcemeat that fills the tureen around the split birds; lean on the mushrooms and skip pricey truffles if you like.
- Low and slow“A very slow fire for several hours” is a gentle braise — an oven around 275–300°F (135–150°C), covered, basting with the jelly as it melts to a sauce.
- Sourcing snipeWild snipe is hard to come by; quail or squab braise beautifully the same way.
Snipe are small, long-billed wading birds so fast and erratic in flight that only a crack shot could bring one down — which is exactly how the word sniper was born. British soldiers in eighteenth-century India began calling their best marksmen “snipers,” after the hunters skilled enough to hit a snipe. The bird’s elusiveness also gave us the “snipe hunt,” the practical joke of sending a novice out for a creature that never quite appears. On the plate, snipe was a delicacy of the sporting table — rich enough to carry madeira, truffles, and hours of slow cooking.
From page 32 of the 1904 edition.
Original page from the book
