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As Coqs noirs, or Coqs de bruyère, à la royale, blackcocks are larded, braised, and served with a white sauce and little rissoles of game.
À la Rob Roy, they are stuffed, roasted with sprigs of heather and whiskey, and served with melted-butter sauce.
Grouse are also dressed in this way.
SNIPES.
Snipes cut in halves, baked on layers of bacon, with butter, are served cold as Bécassines en terrine à l'Irlandaise.
Boudin de bécassines à l'Épicurienne is a pudding of snipes, with mushrooms, truffles, etc., and wine, in suet crust.
Quails, Plovers, and Larks, may be dressed in hot pies, and served as Pâtés chauds de cailles, pluviers, or mauviettes; or in cold pies, as Pâtés froids. Any small birds may be used for these pies.
Pâté de mauviettes à la Melton Mowbray is a lark pie with veal and bacon, mushrooms, truffles, etc.
Pâté de mauviettes à la Moderne is a raised pie of boned larks stuffed with beef forcemeat.
This is not a set of recipes but a page from a menu-writer’s dictionary: each line gives a French name you could put on a card and a one-line account of what the kitchen would send up. Most of the birds listed are no longer food.
- The birdsBlackcock, snipe, plover and lark are wild birds a shop today cannot sell you, and in most of Britain, Europe and North America cannot legally sell anyone. Of the whole page only quail, now farmed everywhere, and red grouse in its autumn season are realistically obtainable.
- LardedLarding means threading strips of back fat through lean flesh with a long needle. Wild birds carry almost no fat of their own, and nothing in a modern kitchen replaces the needle; barding, which is tying fat bacon over the breast, is the usual stand-in and does a shallower job.
- Pie, not pâtéA pâté on this page is a pie with pastry round it, hot or cold, not the spreadable meat paste the word now means. Pâté de mauviettes à la Melton Mowbray is a raised crust holding whole boned larks.
- Counting the birdsA lark pie is built from dozens of birds the size of a thumb. Read for the shape of the dish rather than the ingredient, it is a pie of many small boned birds, and quail is the only one you can now buy by the dozen.
- Suet crustThe snipe pudding is boiled in a suet crust, which is shredded beef suet and flour lining a basin. Suet is still sold, including a vegetable version, and the method has not changed; what has gone is the habit of serving a boiled savoury pudding at a formal dinner.
- Heather and whiskeyÀ la Rob Roy is a label as much as a method. The sprigs of heather and the whiskey are there to justify the name on the card, which is the business this book is really in.
The page is organised for someone writing a menu in French for an English dinner, which was the convention of the period: the card said Coqs de bruyère à la royale and the cook knew that meant larded, braised and sauced in white. Read as a list of supply rather than of cookery, it is startling. Grouse, blackcock, snipe, plover, quail and lark all reached this kitchen whole and feathered, in quantity, and the book assumes without comment a cook who could bone a lark and a larder that saw game by the brace rather than by the piece. The French names attached to them — à la royale, à l’Irlandaise, à l’Épicurienne, à la Melton Mowbray — are doing social work, placing a wild bird shot in the north on the same card as a dish from a French restaurant kitchen.