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Flour (Salt and pepper Sherry wine)
Salt and pepper Sherry wine Remove breasts and legs from birds, season with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in butter. To butter in pan add vegetables and peppercorns, and cook five minutes. Separate backs of birds in pieces, cover with cold water, add vegetables, and cook slowly one hour. Drain stock from vegetables, and thicken with flour diluted with enough cold water to pour easily. Season with salt, pepper, and wine. If not rich enough, add more butter. Allow one bird to each individual dish, sauce to make sufficiently moist, and cover with plain or puff paste, in which make two incisions, through which the legs of the bird should extend.
A game-bird pie in individual dishes, printed here with its ingredient list mangled in transcription — only "flour," "salt and pepper" and "sherry wine" survive as a heading. The method is complete enough to follow, but several quantities have to be supplied by the cook.
- What the birds areThe instruction to allow one bird per individual dish, with the legs protruding through the crust, points to small game birds — quail, squab, woodcock or the like. A poussin or Cornish hen works in the same way, though the legs are stouter and the pastry openings need to be wider.
- The missing ingredient listThe "vegetables" are unspecified in what survives of the heading; the standard aromatic set for a game stock is onion, carrot and celery, about a cup total, chopped small. Peppercorns are called for but not counted — six to eight would suit a stock of this size.
- Two separate cookingsBreasts and legs are floured and sautéed only; the backs and carcasses go into cold water with vegetables for an hour to make the stock. Do not simmer the breast meat in the stock, which is the whole point of the division — game breast turns dry and livery the moment it is overcooked.
- Deglaze rather than discardCooking the vegetables in the same butter the birds were browned in, then building the sauce on that base, is where the flavour lives.
- ThickeningFlour slaked in cold water is a whitewash thickener; whisk it into simmering stock in a thin stream and let it boil a full two minutes or the sauce will taste of raw flour. Roughly 1 tablespoon flour per cup of stock gives a sauce that coats a spoon.
- The sherryAdd it near the end and let it cook a minute. Use a dry amontillado or fino rather than anything labelled "cooking sherry," which is salted; a couple of tablespoons per pint of sauce is enough to read without dominating.
- Oven and pastryNo temperature is given. Puff paste needs a hot oven, 425F, for 20 to 25 minutes until the crust is set and coloured; the filling is already cooked, so the bake is for the pastry alone. Set the dishes on a sheet pan — these pies boil over.
- Sauce level"Sauce to make sufficiently moist" means the filling should be napped, not swimming. A pie filled to the rim can lift its own lid and overflow.
- YieldOne bird and one dish per person, as stated. The stock from the carcasses of four birds gives roughly a pint of sauce, which is about right for four pies.
Individual game pies with the bird's legs pushed up through the crust are often said to have been a conceit of late nineteenth-century American entrée cookery — the protruding drumsticks told the diner, before a fork went in, exactly what was under the pastry. The dish belongs to the era when quail, snipe, woodcock and plover still arrived at city markets by the dozen from commercial hunters, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s treat small wild birds as an ordinary purchase rather than a rarity. That trade wound down through a cumulative process — the Lacey Act of 1900, the Weeks-McLean Act of 1913, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which covered migratory species such as woodcock, snipe and plover, while quail and other non-migratory game remained under state regulation; recipes like this one survive from the short window when a cook could buy a half-dozen game birds as easily as a chicken. The construction — sauté the prime cuts, simmer the carcass for stock, marry the two under a crust — is straightforward, and it wastes nothing, which was the other half of the point.