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Roasted Pheasant
Singe and truss the bird and put inside a shallot and a lump of butter; lard the breast close with thin strips of bacon, and tie a thin strip of bacon over the larded part. Roast the bird in a good hot oven, basting it often with butter. Five minutes before taking the bird from the oven remove the slice of bacon and brown the larded part. When cooked place the bird on a hot dish, strew over it some crumbs of bread that have been fried brown in butter, and serve it with a sauceboatful each of rich brown gravy and bread sauce.
A straightforward English game roast dressed for an American hotel dining room. Pheasant is very lean, so nearly every instruction here exists to keep the breast from drying out.
- The hinge: fat on the breastThe bacon is not seasoning, it is insulation. Without it a pheasant breast is dry well before the legs are done, which is why the bacon comes off only in the last five minutes to let the surface colour.
- "A good hot oven"The book gives no figure; in period usage this is roughly 400-450F, so around 425F is a reasonable modern reading. At that heat a young hen pheasant of about 2 lb takes roughly 40-45 minutes, a larger cock bird closer to an hour; check at the thigh joint rather than by the clock.
- DonenessModern practice is 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, with the breast pulled nearer 155-160F and rested ten minutes under foil. A kitchen of this period would very likely have served it pinker.
- Larding"Lard the breast close with thin strips of bacon" means threading strips through the flesh with a larding needle, close-set. Few home cooks own one; barding, which is simply tying sheets of fat or bacon over the breast, does most of the same work.
- The shallot and butterThese go in the cavity as aromatics, not as stuffing to be eaten. One peeled shallot and a tablespoon or two of butter is the intent.
- Fried crumbsCoarse fresh breadcrumbs fried in butter until brown and crisp, a standard accompaniment to roast game in English service. Fry them just before serving; they soften within minutes on a hot bird.
- Bread sauceAssumed knowledge in 1896 and worth stating: milk infused with onion, clove and bay, thickened with fresh white crumbs and finished with butter and cream. It is sent to table in its own boat.
- Shot and hangingFarmed birds today arrive plucked and drawn, so the singeing is usually unnecessary. Wild birds may still carry lead shot; feel along the breast before carving.
- YieldOne pheasant serves two generously, or three at a table with several courses, as the Waldorf's would have been.
Pheasant reached the American table as a deliberately English gesture. The bird is not native to North America; ring-necked pheasants were introduced from Asia in the late nineteenth century — the Willamette Valley planting of 1881 came directly from China, earlier attempts with English stock having largely failed — and by the 1890s enough were in the field, and in the game markets, to appear on hotel menus. Everything about this treatment is borrowed from British game cookery of the period: the barding bacon, the bread sauce, the fried crumbs strewn over the bird at the last moment. That trio was, and largely remains, the standard English accompaniment to roast game birds, and its presence in Oscar Tschirky's book is a reminder that the Waldorf's kitchen sold Europe to New York. Bread sauce itself is much older than the hotel, generally traced to medieval thickening of sauces with crumbs rather than flour, and it survived into the modern era largely because of its attachment to game.