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Roasted Woodcocks
Truss the required quantity of woodcocks without drawing them, fastening the legs close to the body with an iron skewer. Toast as many slices of bread as there are woodcocks. Roast the woodcocks in a good oven. Lay a slice of toast in a drippingpan under each bird to catch the trail, and let them roast for thirty minutes. They should be rather underdone. While they are roasting baste them with butter. When sufficiently cooked lay the pieces of toast on a hot dish and put one of the birds on each, pour a little beef gravy in the dish, and serve some more in a sauce tureen. Garnish the dish with thin slices of lemon and watercress.
This is a nineteenth-century game preparation that depends on two things a modern kitchen cannot supply: a legally marketable woodcock and a tolerance for eating the bird's undrawn intestines barely cooked. The notes below explain the specific obstacles rather than adapting the method.
- The bird is protectedThe American woodcock is a migratory bird covered by federal protection; it may be taken only by licensed hunters in a regulated season and cannot lawfully be bought or sold in the United States. The Eurasian woodcock is a regulated quarry species in Britain and much of Europe, where licensed game dealers may sell birds shot in season. In the United States no supermarket or ordinary butcher can supply one, and no substitution is being offered here.
- "Without drawing them"The birds are trussed and roasted with the viscera intact, and the toast is placed beneath to catch the "trail" — the intestines and their contents, which were eaten spread on the bread. This puts gut contents in direct contact with the food, which is precisely the route by which Campylobacter and Salmonella spread from game birds.
- "Rather underdone"Thirty minutes of roasting for a small bird deliberately left rare, combined with undrawn entrails, means the interior never reaches a temperature that would kill the organisms carried in a wild bird's gut. Current guidance for all poultry and game birds is a fully cooked interior; this recipe is written to avoid that on purpose.
- Lead shotWild-shot birds carry embedded shot and shot fragments, and lead residue disperses through the surrounding flesh. Where lead ammunition is still in use this is an additional, unavoidable exposure in a bird eaten whole.
- Vessels and terms"A good oven" is the book's own phrase for a hot coal range; it gives no temperature and none can be inferred with confidence. A "drippingpan" is a shallow roasting pan; the toast sits in it beneath the bird, and is then transferred to the serving dish. "Beef gravy" at this date usually meant a meat gravy or brown stock rather than a thickened flour gravy.
- If you want the dishConsult a current game-cookery source written to modern food-safety standards, and a licensed source for the bird. Do not follow the method above.
Woodcock held an odd rank among Victorian and Edwardian game birds: it was among the creatures that respectable cooks roasted undrawn, on the traditional reasoning "often said to be because the bird's diet of earthworms left the gut clean enough to eat", its contents spread on toast as a delicacy called the trail. Escoffier, Francatelli and Mrs. Beeton all treat it this way, and Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896), compiled from the Waldorf's kitchens, reproduces the convention without comment. That the recipe appears at all is a reminder of how much wild game moved through American hotel restaurants before the market-hunting trade was shut down: woodcock, plover, canvasback and snipe were menu staples in the 1890s, and the Lacey Act of 1900 and later the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended their commercial sale. The dish survives in Europe as a hunter's preparation, but the version printed here belongs to a period when a diner could order it from a card.