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Larded Grouse
Clean and thoroughly wash a grouse, and lard the legs and breast, placing a skewer through the legs and tail; rub some warmed butter over the breast, then dredge it over with a little salt and plenty of flour. Place it on a bakingdish and set it in a brisk oven, and cook for from twenty to thirty minutes. Cover a hot dish with bread sauce, put the grouse on it, and sprinkle over some fried breadcrumbs. Garnish with parsley, and serve.
A brief, confident set of instructions that assumes a cook who already knows what larding is and what bread sauce tastes like. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the sourcing of the bird, and how far to take the cooking.
- Brisk ovenRead this as 425–450F. Grouse is small and lean, and the short roast depends on high heat to colour the flour-dredged skin before the breast dries out.
- LardingLarding means threading strips of firm pork fat or salt pork through the flesh with a larding needle. Chilled fatback cut into 1/4-inch lardons works; barding — tying thin sheets of fatback or streaky bacon over the breast — gives most of the same protection with far less trouble.
- Sourcing the birdOscar meant wild grouse, likely ruffed or the imported Scottish red grouse. Wild game birds cannot legally be sold in the United States, so a grouse here comes from a hunter. Farmed substitutes of similar size are squab, partridge or a poussin; adjust nothing but a few minutes of timing.
- Timing and donenessTwenty to thirty minutes at that heat brings a one-pound bird to a rosy breast, around 135F, which is how game birds are traditionally served. Wild birds carry a higher pathogen and lead-fragment risk than farmed poultry; cooked through to 165F they will be dry, and that is the trade you are making.
- Bread sauceNot sweet — it is milk infused with onion stuck with cloves, thickened with fresh white breadcrumbs, finished with butter and seasoned with salt, pepper and a scrape of mace. Make it before the bird goes in and keep it warm over hot water.
- Fried breadcrumbsCoarse fresh crumbs fried slowly in butter until dry and gold, drained on paper. They are separate from the sauce and are meant to stay crisp, so scatter them at the table rather than in the kitchen.
- The flour dredgeWarmed butter first, then salt and "plenty of flour" — the flour is doing the work of a crust. Dredge heavily, then shake off the loose excess or it will taste raw.
- Resting and yieldOne grouse is one generous serving, or two small ones. Let the bird sit five to eight minutes before it goes onto the sauce; carve the legs off whole and the breasts off the bone.
Roast grouse with bread sauce and fried crumbs is the standard British game-bird service of the nineteenth century, carried into American hotel kitchens more or less intact — the same trio appears in Mrs. Beeton and in shooting-season menus of the period. The New York market in the 1890s still traded openly in wild game before market-hunting laws and the Lacey Act of 1900 began closing it down. Larding is the older answer to the central problem of grouse: the breast is almost fatless and the roasting window is narrow. Bread sauce is often described as a survival of the medieval habit of thickening with bread rather than flour.