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Roasted Grouse
Clean the grouse the same as chicken; put a small piece of butter inside each bird and truss into shape. Roast in a hot oven twentyfive or thirty minutes, basting frequently with melted butter. Boil the liver until tender; mash it to a paste with butter and seasoning; spread over thin slices of buttered toast moistened with juice from the pan, and lay the grouse on these slices.
A bare-bones game roast that assumes you know what a grouse is and how long it can stand the oven. The margin between juicy and dry is a few minutes.
- "Hot oven"Read that as 425-450F. Grouse are small and very lean, and the whole method depends on fast heat plus constant basting rather than slow cooking.
- Which grouseIn American books of this period the bird is likely to be ruffed grouse or prairie chicken; ruffed and British red grouse run roughly 1 to 1.5 lb whole, less once dressed, with prairie chicken larger. A bird much bigger than that needs longer than the stated half hour.
- DonenessTwenty-five to thirty minutes gives breast meat still pink at the bone, which is how game birds were and still are served in the older tradition. Cooked to the USDA poultry figure of 165F throughout, a grouse will be dry and livery. Decide which you want before it goes in; wild game carries the usual raw-poultry pathogens, so anyone cooking for the very young, elderly or immunocompromised should take it to temperature and accept the texture.
- Bard itThere is almost no fat on a grouse. A sheet of pork fat or two rashers of bacon tied over the breast does more than basting alone, and can be lifted off for the last five minutes to let the skin colour.
- TrussingSimply tie the legs together and the wings against the body with kitchen string, so the bird holds a compact shape and the thin extremities do not scorch.
- The toast is the pointThis is the classic game croute: fried or toasted bread under the bird catching pan drippings, spread with the mashed liver. The recipe says boil the liver until tender; do not take it far past the point where it firms, as overcooking makes it grainy. The recipe's "seasoning" is unspecified; salt and pepper, and optionally a little lemon or brandy, suit it.
- ShotWild-shot birds carry pellets. Run a finger over the breast before roasting and warn anyone at the table.
- Resting and yieldRest the birds five to eight minutes before serving, loosely covered. One grouse per person is the standard portion; ruffed grouse are small enough that a hearty eater will finish one alone.
Roast grouse on a liver-spread croute is one of the fixed forms of Anglo-American game cookery, and this entry follows the pattern familiar from British game cookery. In Britain the dish is bound up with the red grouse season, which opens on 12 August, the so-called Glorious Twelfth; in the United States the bird on the table would more often have been ruffed grouse or prairie chicken, both still market game before the market hunting of wild birds was shut down by law. The toast is not garnish but engineering: a lean bird gives up little fat, so the bread is there to catch what juices there are, and the mashed liver supplies the richness the flesh lacks. Game chapters of this sort tend to assume, as this entry does, that the cook already knows how to pluck and draw a bird and needs only the timing and the trimmings.