Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This page describes collecting wild birds' eggs, shooting birds for specimens, or similar practices. These activities are now illegal under wildlife-protection laws, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and they contributed to the decline of the very species described.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Wild Biddies and Birdies
As for prairie chicken there really is no better way than to yank off the big breasts of dark meat and broil them, with butter for basting. They must be hand-picked of course, wiped clean, never washed, and like all grouse, quail and small birds, dipped in melted butter before they're ready for the fire. After wolfing the breasts a hash can be made of left-over legs, liver, heart, gizzard, Pope's nose and meaty "merry thoughts"-old English name for wishbones, moistened with claret and lemon and a dozen stoned olives stirred in at the finish. Served with diced croutons fried in butter, this specialty of the wheat States is tasty enough to make a prairie pioneer turn on his spit. It's an innocent way, too, to conceal out of season birds that have met with accidental death. You can safely invite the game warden to lunch, tell him it's guinea hen and he'll roll eyes and tongue, smack his lips and allow that maybe it is.
Serving croutons with the wild biddy may seem but an effete, inconsequential detail. It's not. As a matter of fact it's the essence of the whole matter, because the juices of game are the very life blood of the dish and not one drop can be sacrificed. So serve crunchy toasts and browned crusts always, all sorts and varieties of sippets and soppets, rusks, fried breads and flaky vol-au-vents, any kind of crisp dunking bit to sop up the salubrious sauces.
Especially is this true with the smaller birds.
Every bit of reed birds, snipe and woodcock are indeed so precious that only the feathers and whistle are discarded. The fact is, their toothsome little bodies are never even opened, but cooked and eaten whole. And those in the know esteem the brains as the most delicate morsel.
Now don't get squeamish, remember your own forefathers in England ate grouse so high that the bones had turned green and powdery, and some of us descendants still do, chomping them down, bones and all. The best Mayflower families dined on skunk, after trying out the oil, often telling the uninitiated that it was chicken.
And our barbarian French cousins who thrive on frogs and snails dress up in chasseur costumes fit for a safari when they're only out after song birds. They actually eat cunning little figpeckers raw, first warming them under their comical hunting caps, then ripping off feet and feathers and popping them into their mouths like roast chestnuts. But then, Australians consider kangaroo tails kosher, Brazilians fry ants for the table, Mexicans roast armadillos in the shell and our own Alaskans simply dote on breaded bear paws.
The broiled breast is straightforward enough, but most of what surrounds it in this passage cannot be reproduced legally or safely today. The notes below explain what the terms mean and where the recipe fails.
- The birds themselves are protectedReed birds (bobolinks), snipe and woodcock are migratory species covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and taking or possessing them outside a regulated season is a federal offence. Greater prairie chicken is a species of conservation concern across most of its former range and is closed to hunting in many states.
- Whole undrawn birdsCooking small birds without opening them means cooking the gut contents along with the meat. Intestinal bacteria in an undrawn carcass are not reliably killed by a short broil.
- Brains and nervous tissueThe passage praises the brains of the small birds, which are cooked and eaten whole, head included. The prion risk in the standing warning applies to cattle, not birds; the practical objection is that a bird shot in the field cannot be inspected for disease at all.
- Game hung until the bones go greenThe author's approving reference to grouse aged past the point of powdery green bone is describing spoilage, not ripeness. Meat that far gone may carry bacterial toxins, some of which cooking does not destroy.
- Concealing out-of-season birdsThe advice about serving illegal game to a game warden as guinea hen was written as a joke and reads as one now, but it describes a wildlife violation. Nothing in this section should be used to plan a meal.
- Archaic termsThe Pope's nose is the fatty tail nub; merry thoughts is an older English name for the wishbone; sippets and soppets are small strips or dice of fried or toasted bread; vol-au-vent is a puff-pastry case. Claret means a dry red Bordeaux or any dry red wine standing in for one.
- If you want the dishFor broiled game-bird breasts and a hash of the trim, use a current recipe and lawfully taken or farmed birds, with the carcasses drawn and chilled promptly.
This is writing from the tail end of the American market-and-camp game tradition, when a cookbook could still assume that a reader shot his own dinner and treated the bag law as a matter of taste. The prairie chicken it centres on was once so abundant across the wheat states that it was shipped to city markets by the barrel; sustained hunting, and above all the ploughing of the tallgrass prairie, cut the population so far that most states closed the season entirely in the twentieth century, and the heath hen, its eastern relative, was extinct by 1932. The insistence on croutons and sippets is genuine period technique rather than affectation: game birds are lean and their expressed juices are the sauce, so English and Anglo-American cookery from at least the eighteenth century served small birds on fried bread set beneath them in the pan. The catalogue of other nations' foods at the end, with its slurs and its self-congratulating shudder, is the ordinary tone of sporting prose of the day and is preserved here for the record rather than for its accuracy.