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Roasted Snipes
Pluck, single and draw some snipes and take out the backbones. Chop fine a quantity of fresh pork and mix with it an equal amount of chopped raw mushrooms, one pinch of shallot, some parsley, salt and pepper. Fill the birds with the above mixture, sew them up and truss; fix the snipes on a spit and roast them in front of a clear fire, or, if not convenient, roast them in the oven, basting them constantly with butter. Place some slices of bread underneath the birds in the drippingpan. Put two sliced onions into a stewpan with a small lump of butter, season with salt and pepper, and fry until well browned; then dredge in a little flour, and stir in by degrees about one-half pint of stock, and boil it gently until the onions are cooked. Fry the trails of the snipes with three chickens' livers, season them, pound and pass them through a fine hair-sieve. Put the puree of trails into a saucepan with a little white wine and the onions, stir them over the fire for a few minutes, but do not allow them to boil. When cooked remove the snipes from the fire, brush them over with melted glaze, put the pieces of bread from the drippingpan on a hot dish, stand the snipes on them, pour the sauce over, and serve.
A classic game-course preparation from the Waldorf's kitchen, written for cooks who had whole birds, an open fire and a stockpot going. The sauce is the difficult part, not the roasting.
- "Single" means singeAfter plucking, the remaining hairs and pin feathers are burned off over a flame. A gas burner or a kitchen torch does it in seconds; wipe the bird afterward.
- Sourcing the birdsSnipe are not sold commercially in the United States; wild-shot birds come from licensed hunters in season. Farmed quail of similar size stands in without changing the method, though quail are milder.
- The trailsThe "trails" are the bird's intestines, which snipe and woodcock are traditionally cooked with rather than gutted of. Here they are fried with chicken livers and sieved. If your birds have been drawn, use chicken livers alone the sauce is still good.
- Hair sieveA fine hair-sieve is a tamis. A fine-mesh strainer worked with a ladle, or a food mill on the finest plate, gives the same result.
- The hinge: do not boil the sauceThe liver-and-trail pur ers simmers, so it will granulate the moment it boils. Hold it below a shiver, off direct heat if need be, and finish it just before serving.
- Oven and heatThe recipe gives no temperature. For roasting rather than spit-turning, a hot oven of around 450F will colour the skin before the flesh dries. Baste every few minutes as directed; these birds carry almost no fat.
- The pork stuffing changes the timingA snipe alone wants ten to twelve minutes and comes out pink. Raw ground pork inside it must reach 160F, which means a longer roast and a fully cooked bird. Judge by the stuffing with an instant-read thermometer, and accept that the breast will not be rare.
- Measures and glazeHalf a pint of stock is one cup. "Melted glaze" is glace de viande brown stock reduced to a syrup; a spoonful of reduced demi-glace brushed on gives the lacquer intended.
- YieldOne snipe per person as a game course, two if it is the main dish. The bread slices under the birds catch the drippings and are served as the base, so cut them to the size of the birds.
Snipe belonged to the nineteenth-century game course, the stretch of an American hotel menu that ran from canvasback duck through woodcock, plover and reed birds and was the surest sign of an expensive dinner. Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf opened in 1893, when market gunning still supplied restaurants with wild birds by the barrel; the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended that trade, which is why a dish this ordinary to Oscar is nearly unobtainable now. The technique of roasting small birds undrawn, on toast set beneath them to catch the trails, belongs to a shared European and English game tradition and is much older than the book tradition that gives us woodcock on toast. The stuffing is chopped pork and raw chopped mushrooms.