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Broiled Pheasant or Prairie Chicken
Scald and skin, cut off the breast and cut the rest up in joints, being careful to remove all shot; put in hot water all except the breast (which will be tender enough without parboiling), and boil until it can be pierced with fork, take out, rub over salt, pepper, and butter, and broil with breast over brisk fire; place a lump of butter on each piece, and set all in the oven a few minutes. For breakfast, serve on fried mush; for dinner on toast with a bit of current jelly over each piece. It may be served with toast cut in pieces about two inches square, over which pour gravy made by thickening the liquor in which the birds were boiled, with a little butter and flour rubbed together and stirred in while boiling. Squirrels may be prepared the same way. -Mrs. W. W. Woods.
A two-stage method — legs and thighs simmered until tender, then everything finished under high heat — that still makes sense for a bird whose dark meat is far tougher than its breast. The instructions assume a wild bird brought in whole from the field.
- The hinge: don't parboil the breastThe recipe is explicit that only the joints go into the water. Pheasant and prairie chicken breast is very lean and turns dry and cottony if simmered; it wants fast, direct heat and nothing more. Keep it out of the pot as instructed.
- "Brisk fire"A hot bed of coals or a modern broiler on high, with the rack 4 to 5 inches from the element. The pieces are already cooked through except the breast, so this stage is browning, not cooking — a few minutes a side.
- Finishing in the ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "set all in the oven a few minutes" only implies a hot oven, and something around 400F will serve, just long enough to melt the butter through the meat. Take breast pieces out when they reach 165F at the thickest point.
- Removing all shotThis is not a nicety. Wild-shot birds carry pellets and bone splinters, and the shot may well be lead, which is still legal for upland game in many places; work over the carcass with your fingers along the shot channels before cooking, and discard badly pulped tissue around them.
- Scald and skinScalding loosens the feathers so the skin peels off with them. Some cooks today pluck rather than skin a pheasant, to keep the skin that protects the lean breast — but if you skin it, the butter in this recipe is doing that job instead.
- Fried mushCornmeal mush cooked thick, poured into a loaf pan, chilled firm overnight, then sliced and fried in butter or bacon fat until crisp. The polenta principle, under its nineteenth-century American name.
- "Current jelly"Currant jelly — red currant, the standard sweet-tart accompaniment to game in this period. Any tart jelly stands in.
- The gravyBeurre manié: equal parts soft butter and flour rubbed to a paste, dropped into the simmering cooking liquor a bit at a time. About 1 tablespoon of each per cup of liquid. Let it boil a minute or two so the flour loses its raw taste.
- YieldOne pheasant serves two, generously; a prairie chicken about the same. Two birds for a family dinner with the toast and gravy.
- AvailabilityRing-necked pheasant is farmed and sold year-round. Greater prairie chicken is a different matter — populations collapsed after this book was written, the Attwater's subspecies is federally endangered, and hunting is closed or tightly limited across most of its former range. Check your state's regulations; the substitution of farmed pheasant is the practical route.
The greater prairie chicken was once so abundant on the tallgrass prairie that it was shipped to city markets by the barrel, and its appearance in a cookbook like The Dixie Cook Book — a Southern-marketed compilation reworked from the Ohio Buckeye Cookery — reflects a bird treated as everyday meat rather than trophy game. The recipe's structure — boil the tough joints, broil the tender breast, serve on fried mush at breakfast and on toast with currant jelly at dinner — shows how completely game was folded into ordinary household cooking, with the same dish adjusted for the hour of day. Mrs. Woods's closing line, that squirrels may be prepared the same way, is the tell: this is a general method for small wild meat, not a recipe for a delicacy. Within a few decades of its publication, market hunting and the plowing of the prairie had reduced the bird to a fraction of its former numbers.