Snipes, to Dress
INGREDIENTS.
Snipes, butter, flour, toast. AVERAGE COST 1s. 6d. to 2s. a brace.
SNOW CAKE.
These, like woodcocks, should be dressed without being drawn. Pluck, and wipe them outside and truss them. (See Trussing).
Place four on a skewer, tie them on to the jack or spit, and roast before a clear fire for about 1/4 hour. Put some pieces of butteredtoast into the dripping-pan to catch the trails; flour and froth the birds nicely, dish the pieces of toast with the snipes on them; ROAST SNIPE. and pour round, but not over them, a little good brown gravy. They should be sent to table very hot and expeditiously, or they will not be worth eating.
TIME.-About hour.
SODA CAKE. other ingredients, and beat well for 20 minutes. Put in whichever of the above flavourings may be preferred; pour the cake into a buttered mould or tin, and bake it in a moderate oven from 1 to 1½ hour.
TIME.-1 to 1½ hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A spit-roasted game bird from the era when snipe were sold by the brace and cooked whole, undrawn, over an open fire. The method translates to a very hot oven, but the timing is the whole point: snipe is small, lean and dark, and a few minutes too long ruins it.
- The hinge: heat and speedSnipe must go to the table straight from the fire; the recipe is explicit that they be "sent to table very hot and expeditiously, or they will not be worth eating." Everything else -- the flouring, the frothing, the toast already waiting in the pan -- exists to get the birds out and served without pause.
- Oven equivalentA "clear fire" for game means fierce radiant heat. The book gives no oven setting; the nearest modern approximation is a very hot oven, around 450F, on a rack over a shallow tin, for about the quarter hour the recipe allows, less for a very small bird. Judge by eye at the breast rather than by the clock alone.
- Undrawn birds and the trailsTraditional practice left snipe and woodcock ungutted so the trail would melt onto the toast beneath. This is uncooked wild intestine, and no part of it reaches a safe temperature in a quarter of an hour. If you want the toast, draw the birds and use the livers, browned properly in butter.
- "Flour and froth"Dust the birds lightly with flour part-way through roasting and baste with hot butter, which puffs and crisps the coating. In an oven, brush with melted butter and give a final dredge of flour for the last three or four minutes.
- Spit and jackA jack is the mechanism that turned a spit before an open hearth; depending on the type it was clockwork, weight-driven, or powered by the chimney draught. The recipe puts four birds on one skewer. A roasting rack set over the drip tin does the same job, birds breast-up, not touching.
- Cost and quantity1s. 6d. to 2s. a brace was the market price given. Allow two birds per person as a main course, one as a savoury course, and one round of buttered toast per bird.
- Gravy"Good brown gravy" here means a plain, well-reduced brown stock, poured round the toast rather than over it, as the recipe directs, so it does not sog. A few spoonfuls per plate is enough; the dish is not meant to be saucy.
Snipe and woodcock were the two birds English cookery insisted on treating alike -- roasted whole, undrawn, and set on toast to catch what the Victorians politely called the trail. The reasoning, repeated in nearly every nineteenth-century kitchen book, was that both birds feed on soft ground invertebrates and so were held to have no offensive contents, a claim often stated as fact and never much examined. Mrs Beeton's household readers bought them by the brace from poulterers through the autumn and winter shooting season, when small wild birds of every kind reached town markets in quantity. The fashion for serving them barely cooked and very hot belongs to the same taste that produced the savoury course: intensely flavoured, tiny in portion, and treated as a test of the cook's timing rather than her larder.