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Blackcock and Ptarmigan (Prepared and served the same)
are prepared and served the same as partridges.
They are in season from 20th August till 10th December. Grouse are prepared and served in the same manner as partridges, except that a little butter should be put inside them, and about ten minutes before you take them from the fire place a piece of toast under the bird and serve it on the toast. Hand gravy and bread sauce. In season from 12th August to 10th December.
The entry works by cross-reference: the method lives under partridges, and what appears here are the variations. The grouse instruction — butter inside, toast slipped underneath near the end — is the part worth carrying over to all three birds.
- The hinge: the toastThe toast goes under the bird for the last ten minutes so it soaks the juices and the butter running from the cavity, then the bird is served sitting on it. Put it in earlier and it turns to sodden pulp; skip it and you lose the best part of the dish.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven and no temperature; it assumes a bird cooked before the fire. For a modern oven, small game of this kind wants fierce heat and short time: 425–450F.
- TimingsThese birds are best served pink by modern habit — 25 to 35 minutes for a grouse, longer for a blackcock, which can run to half again or twice the weight. Breast meat should still be rosy; cooked through it becomes dry and livery.
- BardingAll these birds are very lean. The partridge method the entry refers to is not reproduced here, so whether it barded the breast cannot be checked from this page; period roast game commonly had fat bacon or pork fat tied over the breast, and it is worth doing alongside the butter placed inside.
- "Hand gravy and bread sauce""Hand" means pass separately at table, not pour over. The gravy is a thin clear one from the giblets and pan drippings, not a thickened sauce; bread sauce is milk infused with onion and clove, thickened with breadcrumbs.
- Sourcing the birdsBlack grouse (the blackcock is the male) has declined sharply and is subject to voluntary shooting restraint across much of Britain; it is effectively unobtainable commercially. Red grouse and ptarmigan appear from game dealers in season. A wild or free-range guinea fowl or a brace of partridges stands in for the method.
- Hanging and the trailThese birds were hung for some days before cooking. The trick of roasting a bird undrawn so the trail flavours the toast belongs to woodcock and snipe rather than to grouse; here the recipe puts butter in the cavity instead. Birds bought oven-ready today are drawn and usually barely hung, so expect a milder result.
- YieldOne grouse or ptarmigan per person. A blackcock will serve two to three, and is better jointed after roasting and carved onto the toast.
The season dates given here are the British ones, and they are why a page like this exists at all: a late-Victorian cook working in a country house is likely to have needed to know that grouse arrived on the Twelfth of August and blackcock on the twentieth, since the birds are said to have come into the kitchen the moment the guns went out and were dealt with the same way every time. Blackcock is the male black grouse, ptarmigan the white-winged grouse of high Scottish tops, and both were treated as variations on the partridge rather than as dishes in their own right. This period runs on one template: hot oven, barding fat, short cooking, toast beneath, gravy and bread sauce alongside. The toast is the oldest element, generally traced to the medieval sop or trencher of bread set under roasting meat to catch the fat, long after plates had replaced bread on the table.