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Broiled Snipes
Pick, singe, draw and dry eight fine snipes, remove the skin from the heads, split them into halves without detaching the parts, and place them on a dish. Season with one pinch of salt, one-half pinch of pepper and one tablespoonful of oil; put them to broil (with the bills stuck into the breasts), and allow them to cook for four minutes on either side. Put six slices of hot toast on a hot dish, arrange the snipes on them, spread one gill of maitre d'hotel butter on top, decorate the dish with watercress, and serve.
A Gilded Age game-bird course that survives intact only if you have access to shot birds; everything else in it is straightforward broiling.
- Sourcing the birdsSnipe (in North America, Wilson's snipe) is a legal game bird in season but is not sold commercially, so the eight birds have to come from a hunter. Farmed quail is the usual stand-in: similar weight, similar cooking time, though blander and less musky than snipe.
- Split into halves without detachingThe bird is split open and pressed flat, the halves left joined so it broils evenly and stays in one piece on the toast. The recipe does not say where the cut is made.
- The bills stuck into the breastsNot decoration only. The long bill run through the flattened bird pins it shut and keeps it from curling on the grill, the same job a skewer does. The skinned heads were served and the brains eaten, which was part of the point of snipe.
- Broil means direct fierce heatUse an overhead broiler at its highest setting with the rack close to the element, or a very hot grill. Four minutes a side for a bird of this size leaves it pink at the bone, which is how game birds of this class were usually served; if you want it cooked through, take the breast to 165F and accept a drier result.
- A gill of maitre d'hotel butterA gill is half a cup, which is a great deal of compound butter for eight small birds. Treat it as an upper limit rather than a target — a few tablespoons of butter creamed with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper will do the work of napping the birds and soaking the toast.
- Six slices for eight birdsThe toast is the plate as much as the garnish; it catches the juices and the melting butter. Cut it to fit the birds rather than the other way round, and keep both toast and serving dish hot, since the butter is meant to melt but not to pool and separate.
- YieldEight snipe is a course for four people at most, two birds each, and comfortably three. The watercress is meant to be eaten with the birds, dressed only by what runs off them.
Snipe was standard on the long game lists of American hotel and club menus in the 1890s, alongside canvasback, plover and reedbird, in the last years before market hunting was curbed and the migratory bird laws of the early twentieth century put most wild fowl beyond the reach of restaurant kitchens. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 as the Waldorf was establishing itself on Fifth Avenue, records that world in passing: the treatment is minimal, and the whole dish rests on freshness and a hot fire. The bird's habit of flying in fast erratic zigzags made it difficult to shoot, and the word sniper for a marksman is generally traced to hunters who could reliably hit one. The maitre d'hotel butter — butter worked with parsley and lemon — is the plainest of the French compound butters and appears in the book as a finish for grilled dishes.