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Chopped Parsley, Mushrooms, and Shalot
One ounce of Butter.
Breadcrumbs. Pick and clean a nice young partridge; cut it in half; leave on the legs, but cut off the toes. Press the leg towards the wing, to give the half bird as much as possible the shape of a neat cutlet.
Season with pepper and salt, and sprinkle over it the chopped parsley, mushrooms, and shalot.
Brush the half bird over with butter melted, then sprinkle browned breadcrumbs over it, and broil it for fifteen minutes. Baste again, with butter melted and hot; serve very hot with fried strips of potato, and either good clear gravy or Espagnole sauce.
A half partridge grilled under butter and crumbs, in the manner the Victorians called en crapaudine or simply devilled. The recipe assumes you know the herb mixture from the title and gives no quantities for it, so the notes below fill in what the text leaves out.
- The title is the seasoningParsley, mushrooms and shalot chopped fine together, close to the uncooked makings of a duxelles (a true duxelles is cooked down in butter first). The recipe gives no quantities; for one bird you might allow about a tablespoon of chopped parsley, two tablespoons of finely chopped mushroom and one small shallot. Much more and the mixture is apt to shed water under the grill and steam the skin.
- ShalotSimply an older spelling of shallot. Use one small banana or grey shallot, chopped as finely as you can manage so it cooks through in the fifteen minutes given.
- Browned breadcrumbsNot fresh crumbs. These are raspings: dry crumbs from stale crust, toasted golden in the oven and sieved. Fresh crumbs will scorch before the bird is done. Panko toasted dry in a pan is the nearest shortcut.
- Broil means grillAn overhead grill or salamander, not a baking dish. Preheat fully and set the rack so the bird sits about 4 to 5 inches from the element, breadcrumbed side up, and watch it — crumbs and butter go from browned to bitter quickly.
- Fifteen minutes, and donenessThat is about right for a half young partridge weighing 6 to 8 oz, but check rather than trust the clock. Game birds are traditionally served with the breast faintly pink; if you want the poultry safe temperature, take it to 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, accepting that the breast will be drier.
- The butterOne ounce is two tablespoons, enough for a single bird brushed twice. Clarified butter behaves better under a grill than whole butter, whose milk solids blacken.
- Shaping the half birdThe instruction to press the leg towards the wing matters more than it sounds. A flat, even cutlet shape cooks at one rate; a bird left humped will burn at the breast ridge while the thigh is still raw. Press it flat and, if you like, run a skewer through to hold it.
- Fried strips of potatoMatchstick potatoes, fried crisp — what a French kitchen would call pommes allumettes. Espagnole is the brown mother sauce; a well reduced game or veal stock, or a good jus, serves the same purpose without the day's work.
- YieldHalf a partridge is one portion in a multi-course dinner. As a main course, allow a whole bird, split, per person.
Grilling a small bird split flat, buttered and crumbed is one of the oldest ways of dealing with game in an English kitchen, and by the late nineteenth century it had absorbed a layer of French vocabulary: the parsley-mushroom-shallot mixture is a raw duxelles, and the sauce offered is Espagnole. Duxelles is generally traced to the seventeenth-century French cook La Varenne and the household of the Marquis d'Uxelles, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Books of this sort, published when the grey partridge season ran from the first of September to the first of February, assumed a steady supply of small wild birds and a range with a proper grill or salamander over the fire. The half-bird portion is a sign of the period's service: this was one dish among many at a long dinner, not a plateful on its own.