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Cygnet
By the Romans the Swan, first deprived of its sight, was fattened for the table. In Chaucer's time the meat of a plump Swan was evidently in favour for giving a good ruddy complexion to the men of that day. We read respecting the Monk, in the Canterbury Tales (1385) :- "Now certainly he was a fayre prelat; He was not pale, as a forpinëd gost; A fat swan loved he best of any rost."
Pepys tells in his Diary (January 19th, 1662): "To Mr. Povy's, where really I made a most excellent, and large dinner, he bidding us, in a frolique, to call for what we had a mind, and he would undertake to give it us; and we did, for prawns, Swan, venison, after I had thought the dinner was quite done, and he did immediately produce it, which I thought great plenty." In more modern days a different experience is recorded : "When I was a girl my father shot a Swan-a wild one, as he thoughtpassing over our village before a storm. Alas! it belonged to a nobleman, his dearest friend, and was only taking a frisk round on its own account from the lonely lake where it lived. That bird was skinned for its plumage, and throughout many winters I was the envy of the whole village with a boa, muff, and cuffs of Swansdown feathering. The slaughtered bird was straightway spitted for roasting, and basting. Oh! the smell !! Whitby after a great catch of herrings wouldn't have been in it! The maids turned sick, my grandmother and aunts followed suit, also my grandfather; furthermore, a groom called in for the job turned sick in like fashion; and then, with the confidence of youth, I volunteered to baste that Swan! At last, amid great excitement, he was ready, with the gravy made, and a dish found big enough to hold him; and then with a solemn procession of the family he was served in state. Several of the neighbours came in to have a taste; but, sad to relate, a taste was enough! Of all the tough, stringy, fishy meats I ever tried, that Swan was the worst! Our efforts ended with hacking just a few slices from the breast; but what the legs and wings were like was left unproved. The mistake was that this old Swan had long passed the Cygnet stage."
There is, or was, a Swan pit at Norwich, where Cygnets had their abode for table purposes, being specially fed with this view; and it has been declared that a wild Swan, if killed when young, equals in appetizing flavour a wild duck. The Cygnet should be prepared and trussed like a goose, receiving a stuffing of which three pounds of minced rump steak are an essential ingredient; it is then wrapped in oiled paper, next in waterpaste, and again oiled paper, and roasted like venison; the package requires roasting for at least four hours before a large fire on the spit. It must be frequently basted with butter made liquid by melting. Or, it would be far preferable (says Dr. Thudicum) to bake the Cygnet in a good oven. The popular notion, derived from Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, has no foundation in fact, that "The jealous Swan agens hire deth that syngeth." In Germany giblet pie is a well-known dish, the giblets being stewed with pork chops, and pears, whilst flavoured with sugar, and cloves. The giblets of a Cygnet are esteemed an ambrosial morsel, and form a lordly dish. In England, on the Thames-side, a supper of two Cygnets is served annually for appreciative guests at the "Coach and Horses Inn," Barnes.
The passage ends with a genuine set of roasting instructions, but the bird at its centre cannot legally or practically be obtained today. What follows explains why, and decodes the terms for readers who simply want to understand the method.
- The bird is protectedMute swans in Britain are, by long tradition, Crown birds, and all wild swans are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act. In the United States the native swans (tundra and trumpeter) are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, while the introduced mute swan is not, and tundra swans may be taken under permit in some states. In Britain, at least, taking, killing or possessing one is an offence, and no ordinary lawful supply of cygnet exists for a domestic cook.
- Norwich swan pitThe "Swan pit" referred to was a real fattening enclosure attached to the Great Hospital at Norwich, where cygnets were penned and fed for the table into the nineteenth century. That trade has been gone for well over a century; the reference is antiquarian, not a sourcing suggestion.
- Wildfowl and rancidityThe anecdote about the smell is consistent with old wildfowl generally. Swans are long-lived birds with heavily worked flight muscles, and an adult carcass is coarse and strong-flavoured regardless of technique; the "fishy" note the narrator describes is a common complaint about elderly waterfowl. Cygnets were used precisely because they are younger and milder.
- Water-paste and oiled paperThe "waterpaste" is huff paste, a stiff flour-and-water shell used as a disposable wrapper rather than as pastry to be eaten. Sandwiched between sheets of oiled paper it worked as insulation for a bird turning on an open spit, doing the job a covered roasting tin does now.
- "Before a large fire on the spit"Four hours of spit-roasting reflects radiant heat from one side only, with constant turning and basting. Dr. Thudicum's preference for a good oven, noted in the text, is the sensible reading; a closed oven surrounds the bird with heat rather than cooking one face at a time.
- The steak stuffingThree pounds of minced rump steak in the cavity is a substantial forcemeat for a lean, dark-fleshed bird. Its bulk also indicates the scale of the dish: a cygnet is at least goose-sized.
- If you want the dishA goose or a well-hung duck occupies the same culinary territory, and any current recipe for either will serve. Use one of those rather than adapting the instructions above.
This entry belongs to a genre of late-Victorian writing that treated food as both medicine and antiquarian curiosity: the author gathers Roman practice, Chaucer's fat-loving Monk from the General Prologue, and Pepys's dinner at Mr. Povy's in January 1662 to establish swan as a dish of standing before giving any method at all. Swan was for centuries a status meat in England rather than an everyday one, associated with royal and civic feasting and with the Crown's claim to unmarked mute swans on open water, a claim still marked each year by the Thames swan-upping. By the time this book was written the bird had all but left the English table, surviving in a few ceremonial suppers of the kind mentioned at Barnes and in the Norwich fattening pit; the reference to Dr. Thudichum points to J. L. W. Thudichum, the German-born physician and chemist working in London. The final swipe at Chaucer's dying swan song, from the Parliament of Fowls, is characteristic of the period's pleasure in correcting poetry with natural history.