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Boiled Pheasant
Truss a pheasant for boiling, stuff it either with oyster stuffing as for turkey or with chestnuts. The chestnuts must be boiled and skinned first, stuff at the neck end. Put the bird breast downwards into hot water, and let it boil gently for from half an hour to three-quarters of an hour according to size. Serve with celery sauce poured over and round.
A late-Victorian boiled fowl treatment applied to game. The technique is sound, but the wording hides two things a modern cook needs: "boil gently" means a bare simmer, and stuffing inside a poached bird is the weak point.
- Never actually boil itA rolling boil shreds the lean breast of a pheasant and turns it stringy. Hold the water at 165–180F, barely trembling, and keep it there for the whole cooking time.
- Cook the stuffing separatelyThe centre of a stuffing sitting inside a bird poached for 40 minutes may never reach a safe temperature, and oyster stuffing in particular should not be left short. Bake it in a buttered dish alongside and serve it with the carved bird.
- Timing and donenessA farmed pheasant of 2–2.5 lb takes roughly 30–40 minutes at a simmer, unstuffed. Judge by a thermometer in the thickest part of the thigh, not by the clock: 165F/74C.
- Breast downwardsThis is deliberate and worth keeping: it holds the breast under the liquid so it cannot dry out above the water line.
- The cooking liquidThe original says only "hot water." Salt it and add an onion, a carrot, a few peppercorns and a bay leaf; the bird gives up a good deal of flavour to plain water and gets nothing back. Save the liquid for the sauce.
- ChestnutsVacuum-packed cooked chestnuts replace the boiling and skinning entirely. If starting from raw, score, boil 15 minutes and peel while hot, since the inner skin sets like paper once cold.
- Celery sauceThe period sauce is a white sauce or velouté: sweat chopped celery in butter, simmer in the poaching liquid or milk, thicken with a butter-flour roux, sieve or blend, then finish with cream. Made with the pheasant broth it is considerably better.
- Wild birdsA wild pheasant is leaner, tougher and may carry shot. Check the breast with your fingers before cooking, and expect an older bird to need gentle poaching closer to an hour.
- YieldOne pheasant serves two generously, three at a stretch with the stuffing and sauce.
History: Boiling — properly poaching — was standard treatment for poultry in British kitchens well into the twentieth century, and celery sauce was one of its regular companions, appearing with boiled fowl and boiled turkey in nineteenth-century cookery books including Eliza Acton's. Applying the method to pheasant is a slightly grander move: the bird was game, taken in season (in England, 1 October to 1 February), and a household with pheasants to boil was likely a household with access to a shoot. Chestnuts and oysters both point to the same months, and oysters were cheap enough for much of the nineteenth century to be used generously in stuffings rather than sparingly as a luxury.