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Game Gravy for Mutton
Pluck and draw a very high woodcock or snipe, cut it in pieces together with its entrails (with the bag taken out), put in a saucepan with sufficient plain and unseasoned meat gravy to a little more than cover, and simmer gently for several hours. then strain and serve. This gravy if used for mutton that has been kept for some time will give it a strong venison flavor.
This is a nineteenth-century device for faking venison, and two things in it put it outside what a modern kitchen can do. The points below explain the terms and why the dish fails rather than how to rescue it.
- "Very high" means deliberately rotten"Very high" means well into decomposition -- In game cookery "high" describes a bird hung unplucked until decay is under way; how far was a matter of taste, and "very high" implies the far end of that range. The strong "venison" flavour the recipe promises depends on that ripening. Long simmering kills bacteria but does not destroy heat-stable bacterial toxins or the biogenic amines (histamine, cadaverine, putrescine) that accumulate in spoiled flesh, so hours in the pan do not make the result safe.
- The entrails are left inWoodcock and snipe were traditionally cooked undrawn apart from the gizzard — "the bag" the recipe tells you to remove. Here the whole trail, including the intestine, goes into the gravy from a bird already far gone. That is a direct route for gut organisms and their waste products into the finished sauce.
- Mutton "kept for some time"The recipe assumes a base meat that has been hung, though it does not say for how long or under what conditions. Ageing judged by eye and nose is not a substitute for a measured temperature.
- The birds are not obtainableAmerican woodcock and Wilson's snipe are migratory game birds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. They may be taken only in regulated seasons by licensed hunters and cannot legally be sold, so there is no lawful commercial source for this ingredient in the United States.
- "Plain and unseasoned meat gravy"Not a thickened gravy in the modern sense but an unseasoned meat broth or light brown stock, used here purely as a carrier for flavour.
- If you want the effectDeep game flavour in a mutton or lamb dish is better pursued through a current recipe using a properly handled game stock. Use one.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the working practice of a hotel kitchen that still thought of venison as the aristocrat of meats and mutton as its poor relation, and this entry is frankly a counterfeiting recipe: a strong essence of high game brushed onto well-hung mutton to pass it off as something grander. Woodcock and snipe were the classic "high" birds of European cookery, hung by the beak and eaten undrawn because their diet of worms and soft ground invertebrates left the trail sweet enough to spread on toast — a tradition generally traced to English and French sporting kitchens well before the Waldorf existed. The taste for game ripened to the edge of putrefaction was a genuine period preference, not carelessness, and it faded with mechanical refrigeration, reliable inspection and a general shift in what diners were willing to smell at the table. That the same birds are now protected rather than plentiful is the other half of the story: in the era of the recipe, market hunting of snipe was still legal, and a hotel kitchen could expect to buy wild birds it could not obtain today.