Home › Fowl, Duck, Game, Hare › Fowl, Duck, Game, Hare: Pheasant
Fowl, Duck, Game, Hare: Pheasant
No. 142. Fagiano alla Napoletana (Pheasant) Ingredients: Pheasant, macaroni, gravy, butter, Parmesan, tomatoes.
Lard a pheasant, roast it, and serve it on a layer of macaroni cooked with good reduced gravy, two ounces of butter, a tablespoonful of grated Parmesan, and a purée of tomatoes. Serve with Neapolitan sauce (No. 12) in a sauce bowl.
No. 143. Fagiano alla Perigò (Pheasant) Ingredients: Pheasant, butter, truffles, larding bacon, Madeira.
Make a mixture of three tablespoonsful of chopped truffles, three ounces of butter and a little salt, and with this stuff a pheasant. Then cover it with slices of fat bacon and keep it in a cool place till next day. A few hours before serving roast the pheasant and baste it well with melted butter and a wine-glass of Madeira or Marsala. Make a croûton of fried bread the shape of your dish, and over this put a layer of forcemeat of fowl and a number of small fowl quenelles; cover them with buttered paper, then put the dish in the oven for a few minutes SO as to settle the forcemeat. When the pheasant is cooked, place it on the croûton and garnish it with slices of truffle which have been previously cooked in Madeira, and serve with a Perigord sauce.
No. 144. Anitra Selvatica (Wild Duck) a Ingredients: Wild duck, butter, fowls' livers, Marsala, gravy, turnips, carrots, parsley, mushrooms.
Cut wild duck into quarters and put it into a stewpan with two fowls' livers cut up and fried in butter.
When the pieces of duck are coloured on both sides, pour off the butter, and in its place pour a glass of Marsala, a cup of stock, and a cup of Espagnole sauce (No. 1), and cook gently for ten minutes.
In the meantime shape and blanch six young turnips and as many young carrots, put them into a stewpan, and on the top of them put the pieces of wild duck, liver, &c.
Pass the liquor through a sieve and pour it over the wild duck, add a bunch of parsley and other herbs and five little mushrooms cut up, and cook on a slow fire for half an hour. Skim the sauce, pass it through a sieve and add a pinch of sugar.
Put the pieces of wild duck in an entrée dish, add the vegetables, &c., pour the sauce over and serve.
No. 145. Perniciotti alla Gastalda (Partridges) Ingredients : cauliflower, bacon, sausage, fowls' livers, carrots, onions, herbs, stock, gravy, butter, Madeira. a Cut cauliflower into quarters, blanch for a few minutes, drain, and put it into a saucepan with some bits of bacon. Let it drain on paper till dry, then arrange the bits in a circle in a deep stewpan, and in the centre put a small bit of sausage, the livers of the partridges, a fowl's liver cut up, a carrot, an onion, and a bunch of herbs. Cover about threequarters high with good stock and gravy, put butter on the top and boil gently for an hour; then take out the sausage, replace it by two or three partridges, and simmer for three-quarters of an hour.
In the meantime cut a sausage in thin slices and line a mould with it. When the birds are cooked, take them out, drain and cut them up, and fill the mould with alternate layers of partridge and cauliflower, and steam for half an hour. Five minutes before serving turn the mould over on a plate, but do not take it off, so as to let all the grease drain off.
Cut up the fowls' and partridges' livers, make them into scallops and glaze them.
Wipe off all the grease round the mould; take it off, garnish the dish with the scallops of liver and serve hot with an Espagnole sauce (No. 1) reduced, and add a glass of Madeira or Marsala, and a glass of essence of game to it.
This is an excellent way of cooking an old partridge or pheasant.
No. 146. Beccaccini alla Diplomatica (Snipe) Ingredients: Snipe, ham, larding bacon, herbs, Marsala, croûtons, truffles, cocks' combs, mushrooms, sweetbread, tongue.
Truss fourteen snipe and cook them in a mirepoix made with plenty of ham, fat bacon, herbs, and a wine glass of Marsala. When they are cooked pour off the sauce, skim off the grease and reduce it. Take the two smallest snipe and make a forcemeat of them by pounding them in a mortar with the livers of all the snipe, then dilute this with reduced Espagnole sauce (No. 1) and add it to the first sauce. Cut twelve croûtons of bread just large enough to hold a snipe each, and fry them in butter. Add some chopped herbs and truffles to the forcemeat, spread it on the croûtons, and on each place a snipe and cover it with a bit of fat bacon and buttered paper.
Put them in a moderate oven for a few minutes, arrange them on a dish, and pour some of their own sauce over them. Garnish the spaces between the croûtons with white cocks' combs, mushrooms, and truffles.
The truffles should be scooped out and filled with a little stuffing of sweetbread, tongue, and truffles mixed with a little of the sauce of the snipe. Serve the rest of the sauce in a sauce-boat.
Five game dishes in the grand Franco-Italian manner, written for a kitchen with a larder of stock, Espagnole and truffles already to hand. The assumptions behind them need unpacking before any of them will work on a modern stove.
- Wild birds are lean and overcook fastA wild pheasant of about 2-2.5 lb roasts in roughly 40-45 minutes at 400F, and the breast is best pulled at 150-155F and rested; a farmed bird is fattier and more forgiving. The gentler stewed treatments (Nos. 144 and 145) suit older, tougher birds, exactly as the text says at the end of No. 145.
- "Lard" and "larding bacon"Larding means threading strips of hard back fat through the flesh with a needle; barding means tying sheets of fat over the breast. Larding needles are a specialist item now, and barding with thin-sliced pancetta or unsmoked streaky bacon achieves nearly the same protection. Use unsmoked fat unless you want the smoke to dominate the sauce.
- Oven temperaturesThe 'moderate oven' the book calls for in No. 146, to set the forcemeat and warm the snipe croûtons, is usually read today as around 350F, and only a few minutes are wanted. The book gives no temperature for roasting the pheasant; 400-425F is a reasonable modern setting.
- The sauces are pantry assumptionsEspagnole (No. 1), Neapolitan (No. 12) and Périgueux sauce were all standing preparations in a professional kitchen. A well-reduced brown game stock, fortified at the end with Madeira and mounted with butter, stands in for all three; Périgueux is simply that with chopped truffle. Without a real reduced stock these dishes have no backbone.
- "Perigò"An Italianised rendering of Périgord, the truffle country of southwest France; the recipe's own 'Perigord sauce' supports the reading. The dish is defined by black truffle, and stuffing the bird a day ahead presumably lets the truffle perfume the flesh. Preserved or jarred truffle will give far less; if fresh black truffle is out of reach, the dish loses much of its point.
- Mirepoix here means a braising bed, not diced vegetablesMirepoix here is the older French sense -- In No. 146, 'a mirepoix made with plenty of ham, fat bacon, herbs' is a moist, fatty aromatic bed enriched with ham and bacon, not the plain diced vegetable mix the word now means. The birds cook on it over gentle heat; the liquor is then skimmed and reduced into the sauce.
- Cocks' combs and quenellesWhite cocks' combs, blanched and simmered until translucent, were a standard garnish and are essentially unobtainable now; leave them out rather than substitute. Quenelles of fowl are still easy: raw chicken breast, egg white and cream in a processor, shaped with two spoons and poached below the boil.
- Snipe, and the birds' insidesFourteen snipe is a shooting-season quantity. Snipe are traditionally cooked undrawn, and here the livers of all the birds, pounded with the two smallest snipe, become the forcemeat. Wild snipe cannot be bought in the United States and are seasonal and scarce elsewhere; quail is the practical substitute, though it lacks the liver flavour the sauce is built on.
- YieldThe pheasant dishes serve two to three each; No. 145 with two or three partridges serves four; the snipe dish, at twelve croûtons, is a dinner-party course for twelve.
The Cook's Decameron (1901), compiled by Mrs W. G. Waters, framed a collection of Italian recipes inside a Boccaccio-style conceit: ten diners, ten days. Its game chapter shows how thoroughly the grand Italian kitchen of the period had absorbed French method quart", quenelles, croûtons and Périgord truffle all appear under Italian names, and "Fagiano alla Perigò" is simply pheasant Périgueux with an Italian ending on it. The dishes belong to the game course of a long Edwardian dinner, when pheasant, partridge and snipe arrived from a shooting estate rather than a shop and a cook had trimmings enough to build forcemeats, scallops of liver and truffle garnishes from the birds themselves. The instruction at the close of No. 145 — that it is an excellent way with an old partridge or pheasant — is the practical heart of the chapter: a young bird was roasted, an old one was braised over cauliflower and bacon until it gave in.