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Fillets of Snipes in Cases
Detach the fillets from the bones of some snipes, trim them neatly and lay them in a buttered stewpan. Prepare a puree with the legs of the snipes, a few poultry livers, some game giblets, boiled rice, stock and butter. Procure as many paper cases as there are fillets and brush over their interiors with oil. Fry the fillets over a brisk fire, turning them when they are cooked on one side. Fill the cases with the puree, then place a fillet of snipe in each case. Coat the top of each with some brown sauce that has been reduced with the essence of game, place the cases on a baking sheet, and place them in the oven for a few minutes to glaze. Arrange the cases piled up on folded napkin on a hot dish, and serve.
A late-Victorian hotel garnish dish: two small breast fillets per bird, a rich giblet puree, and individual paper cases finished under heat. Nearly all of the work is in the puree and the sauce.
- The hinge: do not overcook the filletsA snipe breast fillet weighs well under an ounce and is done in roughly a minute a side over high heat. Cooked past rare-pink it turns dry and livery, and no amount of sauce will recover it.
- Sourcing the birdsIn the United States snipe cannot be bought: as migratory game birds they may be taken in season under licence but not offered for sale. In the United Kingdom snipe are legally sold by game dealers during the open season. Failing either, farmed quail breast is the usual stand-in, though it is milder and slightly larger.
- Paper casesCaisses are small pleated paper or foil cases, roughly the size of a large muffin liner and stiff enough to stand alone. Oiling the interior keeps the puree from bonding to the paper. Ordinary thin cupcake liners will slump; use foil cases or double them.
- "A brisk fire"Full heat in a heavy pan. The recipe is ambiguous as to whether the buttered stewpan at the start is the frying vessel itself or merely a dish for holding the trimmed fillets.
- Oven for glazingThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'a few minutes to glaze'. Period kitchens glazed under a salamander or in the top of a hot oven, so a short pass in a hot oven is the nearest modern equivalent; a long, slow pass will dry the fillets.
- Brown sauce and game essenceThis means espagnole or a demi-glace reduced with a concentrated stock made from the carcasses. A modern kitchen would more likely reduce a good brown game stock and mount in a little butter at the end, though the hotel's own sauce would have been the flour-based espagnole.
- The pureeLegs, poultry livers and giblets are sweated in butter, then pounded or blitzed with cooked rice and stock to a smooth, spreadable paste. The rice is a binder, not a bulking agent, and the livers must be cooked through before pureeing.
- YieldEach snipe gives two fillets, so two cases per bird. Figure three to four cases per person as a course, which means two birds each.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the Waldorf's chef, but as maître d'hôtel he assembled its 1896 cookbook out of the hotel's working repertoire, which was French in method and American in supply. Dishes served en caisse - in individual paper cases, piled on a folded napkin - were a standard restaurant flourish of the period, letting a kitchen turn a fiddly, expensive scrap of meat into something that arrived looking deliberate. Snipe, woodcock and other small wild birds were staples of hotel and club menus in that era because market hunting was legal and the birds moved by the barrel through city game dealers. That trade in the United States effectively ended with the Lacey Act and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, after which snipe became something a diner could only eat if someone at the table had shot it - which is why a recipe that once assumed a ready supply now reads as a period document.