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Woodcock, Snipe, and Plovers
These birds are in season from November till March. Pick them very carefully-do not draw them and truss them with the long beak through the wings and top of the legs instead of a skewer.
Brush them over with melted butter; tie a piece of fat bacon over the breast and baste well with butter. Lay a slice of toast under each bird to catch the trail, and send the birds up to table on this toast with slices of lemon. They will take about fifteen to twenty minutes to roast; good gravy should be handed. Take off the bacon before serving.
A classic Victorian treatment of small game birds, and one that cannot simply be carried across to a modern kitchen: it turns on two things — birds roasted undrawn so that the viscera melt into the toast beneath, and a species list that is no longer lawful game.
- Plovers are protectedPlovers -- Golden plover and lapwing were common market birds when this book was written. Lapwing is now protected in the UK under wildlife legislation; golden plover remains a quarry species in Great Britain in season, but its sale is prohibited. Shorebirds are broadly protected in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Woodcock and snipe remain legal quarry in season in some jurisdictions; the plover element of this recipe cannot be reproduced as a market transaction.
- "Do not draw them"This is the hinge of the dish, not an oversight. Woodcock and snipe were held to have clean intestines, and the trail was allowed to run out onto the toast as the bird cooked. It also means the gut contents stay in the carcass throughout roasting, with no way to bring them to a controlled temperature.
- Fifteen to twenty minutesA short roast for a bird of this size, which would leave it well short of done by modern standards. There is no temperature in the original and no way to reconstruct one honestly; anyone wanting to cook game birds today should work from a current recipe with stated oven temperatures and a probe reading.
- The beak as skewerThe long bill is threaded through the folded legs and wings to hold the bird together, replacing a trussing skewer. It is a piece of butchery shorthand rather than decoration, and it is why the head is left on.
- "Bard", not "tie"The fat bacon over the breast is barding: these birds carry almost no fat and dry out quickly. The recipe directs that it be removed before serving, and that the bird be brushed and basted with butter as well.
- The toastA slice set under each bird during roasting rather than added at the end. It absorbs the fat and the trail, and the recipe directs that the bird be sent to table on it.
- "Good gravy should be handed"Handed means passed separately at table in a sauceboat rather than poured over. The recipe specifies nothing further about the gravy.
- YieldThe original states no yield. Period sources commonly reckon one woodcock or two snipe to a person.
Woodcock and snipe held an odd rank in nineteenth-century British cookery: small, expensive, seasonal, and eaten in a way that would have been unthinkable for poultry. The convention of roasting them undrawn rests on the traditional claim that these long-billed probing birds feed on worms and grubs and void their gut continuously, so the trail is edible — a belief repeated in cookery writing from Victorian manuals back through earlier household books, and generally treated as received wisdom rather than anything ever demonstrated. Plovers sat alongside them on the game stalls of the period. The November-to-March season quoted here reflects the shooting and sale calendar of the day rather than any modern statutory season, and the whole entry is brief, assuming a cook who can pluck, truss and manage a range, and who needs no explanation of what a trail was.