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Partridges
Partridges may be split and broiled or stuffed and roasted. Serve with giblet sauce to which a little currant jelly has been added.
This is a two-line reference entry of the kind Mrs. Fryer scattered through her game chapter, assuming the cook already knew how to handle a small bird. The gaps worth filling are the bird itself, the temperature, and the fact that partridge has almost no fat to protect it.
- The hinge: do not overcook itPartridge breast is lean and dries out faster than chicken. Roast at 425F for 20 to 25 minutes for a 12 to 16 oz bird and pull it at 160F in the thickest part of the breast, then rest 10 minutes. Split and broiled, it wants 6 to 8 minutes a side, bone side first.
- Bard itThere is no subcutaneous fat to speak of, so lay bacon or a sheet of pork fat over the breast, or butter it heavily and baste. Period cookbooks commonly call for bacon over the breast of a game bird; this book simply does not repeat it here.
- What bird you will actually getIn American books of this period "partridge" covers several birds: ruffed grouse in New England, bobwhite quail in the South, and the introduced gray or Hungarian partridge in the Midwest. Farmed chukar or gray partridge, roughly a pound dressed, is the closest thing sold today.
- YieldOne bird per person. A pair of quail-sized birds per person if they are under 8 oz.
- Giblet sauceThe heart, gizzard and neck simmered in water with an onion and a bay leaf until reduced to a strong broth, then thickened with a roux made from the pan drippings; the chopped giblets and liver go in at the end. Stir in a tablespoon or two of red currant jelly off the heat so it melts without dulling.
- Stuffing a small birdDo not pack it. A spoonful of bread or chestnut stuffing, or simply a knob of butter with juniper and a strip of lemon peel, is enough; a tightly stuffed 1 lb bird cannot come to temperature inside without the breast going to leather.
- Wild birdsCheck for shot before serving and warn guests. Wild game birds also want to be hung and aged a few days for flavor; the original says nothing about this stage.
- LegalityRuffed grouse and bobwhite are regulated game in most states and cannot be bought or sold wild. Buy farmed birds or work from a licensed hunter's own take.
Loose-leaf cook books like Mrs. Fryer's were sold as ring binders so a household could add clippings and its own cards. Entries like this one read as terse aides-memoire rather than full recipes: the point was to remind the cook of the accepted treatment, not to teach it. Serving game birds with a savory gravy sweetened by currant jelly is an English inheritance, generally traced to the older practice of pairing roast game with tart fruit "sauces" that cut the richness and flatter meat with a faint liver note. The vagueness of the word partridge in American books is genuine rather than careless: colonists applied familiar English game names to whatever local bird filled the same niche, so a New England partridge is a ruffed grouse and a Virginia partridge is a quail, and both were common on the table before market hunting was shut down by state and federal game laws in the early twentieth century.