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Larded Grouse
Clean, remove pinions, and if it be tough the skin covering breast. Lard breast and insert two lardoons in each leg. Truss, and place on trivet in small shallow pan; rub with salt, brush over with melted butter, dredge with flour, and surround with trimmings of fat salt pork. Bake twenty to twenty-five minutes in a hot oven, basting three times. Arrange on platter, remove string and skewers, pour around Bread Sauce, and sprinkle bird and sauce with coarse brown bread crumbs. Garnish with parsley.
Breast of Grouse Sauté Chasseur Remove breasts from pair of grouse, and sauté in butter. When partially cooked, season with salt and pepper. Break carcasses in pieces, cover with cold water, add carrot, celery, onion, parsley, and bay leaf, and cook until stock is reduced to three-fourths cup. Arrange grouse on a serving dish, and pour around a sauce made of three tablespoons butter, four and one-half tablespoons flour, stock made from grouse, and three-fourths cup stewed and strained tomatoes. Season with salt, cayenne, and lemon juice, and add one teaspoon finely chopped parsley, and one-half cup canned mushrooms cut in slices.
Broiled or Roasted Plover Plover is broiled or roasted same as quail.
Fannie Farmer treats grouse as a small, lean roasting bird that must be protected with fat or it dries out. Two secondary recipes are tacked on at the end of the entry, and each has its own quirks.
- Hot ovenThe book calls for "a hot oven" without stating a temperature; the usual modern equivalent is roughly 425-450F. A whole ruffed grouse weighs only about 1 to 1 1/2 lb dressed, so twenty to twenty-five minutes at that heat will leave the breast pink.
- The hinge: fatEverything else in the recipe is scaffolding around one idea. Wild grouse has almost no intramuscular fat, so the larding, the butter, the salt pork trimmings and three bastings exist to keep the breast from turning to sawdust. Skip them and the timing no longer works.
- LardoonsLardoons are matchsticks of firm fat back or salt pork, threaded through the meat with a larding needle. If you have no needle, cut deep slits with a boning knife and push the strips in, or drape thin sheets of fat pork over the breast and tie them on.
- Pinions and trivetPinions are the wingtip joints, which carry little meat and burn. A trivet here is simply a rack that lifts the bird clear of the pan so the underside does not stew in its own drippings.
- DonenessMany game cooks now pull the breast at 145-150F and let it rest, though the USDA figure for poultry, including wild game birds, is 165F. The legs and thighs of an older bird stay sinewy at the lower temperature and are better braised or saved for stock than served alongside.
- Bread SauceA separate recipe in the same book: milk infused with onion, thickened with soft crumbs and enriched with butter. Browned crumbs scattered over the top are a standard English garnish for game.
- The chasseur sauce ratioThree tablespoons butter to four and a half tablespoons flour is butter-light for the amount of flour, and with about 1 1/2 cups of liquid the result will be a thick sauce. Equal weights of butter and flour, cooked out before the stock goes in, gives a sauce you can pour.
- Canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms were the reliable year-round option then. Fresh cremini, sliced and browned in butter first, do the job better; add them at the end so they do not go grey in the sauce.
- PloverThe closing line is not usable in North America. Plovers and other shorebirds are protected under migratory bird law and cannot legally be taken or served; in 1896 they were still sold in markets.
- YieldOne grouse serves one generously or two modestly. The sauté recipe uses the breasts of a pair, which is two servings.
Grouse belongs to the late-nineteenth-century American game chapter, when wild birds were still a commercial commodity: markets in Boston and New York sold barrels of prairie chicken, quail, woodcock and plover by the dozen, and a cookbook aimed at middle-class households could reasonably assume a reader might buy one. The larding technique and the bread sauce come straight out of English game cookery, where bread sauce with roast grouse is a pairing generally traced to the eighteenth century and still standard today. "Chasseur" simply means hunter's style, and in French practice denotes the mushroom-and-tomato sauce Farmer builds here from the broken carcasses. Within a few decades of this book, market hunting had collapsed populations badly enough that the trade in wild birds was brought to an end by a combination of measures, among them state game laws, the Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which is why a page like this now reads as a document of a food economy that no longer exists.