Fig Sauce
Figs are very fine for dessert, stewed slowly until soft. Season with two ounces loaf-sugar to a pound of fruit; cook two hours; add a glass port or other wine, also lemon-juice if liked. Can be seasoned with a few bitter almonds or orange-peel. -A Georgia housekeeper. Of game birds the woodcock outranks all in delicate tenderness and sweet flavor. The thigh is especially deemed a choice tidbit. The leg is the finest part of the snipe, but generally the breast is the most juicy and nutritious part of birds.
White-meated game should be cooked to well-done; dark-meated game rare. The flesh of wild animals is harder and more solid, and has a less proportion of fat and juices to the lean, and is therefore less easy of mastication when eaten within a day, and more nutritious, and the flavor more concentrated. Their decided flavor recommends them to invalids or others who are satiated with ordinary food. Keeping game renders it more tender, and brings out its flavor. When birds have become tainted, pick clean as soon as possible and immerse in new milk for twenty-four hours, when they will be quite sweet and fit for cooking.
Birds should be carefully dry-picked (removing all feathers that come off easily), plunged in a pan of boiling water and skinned, drawn, wiped clean, and all shot removed. Game should not be washed, unless absolutely necessary for cleanliness. With care in dressing, wiping will render them perfectly clean. If necessary to wash, do it quickly and use as little water as possible. The more plainly all kinds of game are cooked, the better they retain their fine flavor. They require a brisker fire than poultry, but take less time to cook. Their color, when done, should be a fine yellowish brown.
Serve on toast.
Broiling is a favorite method of cooking game, and all birds are exceedingly nice roasted. To broil, split down the back, open and (167) 4 1 1 flatten the breast by covering with a cloth and pounding, season with pepper, and lay the inside first upon the gridiron; turn as soon as browned, and when almost done take off, place on a plat ter, sprinkle with salt, and return to the gridiron. When done, place in a hot dish, butter both sides well, and serve at once. The time required is usually about twenty minutes.
To roast, season with salt and pepper, place a lump of butter inside, truss, skewer, and place in oven. The flavor is best preserved without stuffing, but a plain bread-dressing, with a piece of salt pork or ham skewered on the breast, is very nice. A delicate way of dressing is to place an oyster dipped in the well-beaten yolk of an egg or in melted butter, and then rolled in bread crumbs, inside each bird. Allow thirty minutes to roast or longer if stuffed. Wild ducks, pheasants and grouse are always best roasted. To lard game, cut fat salt pork into thin, narrow strips, thread a larding-needle with one of the strips, run the needle under the skin and a little of the flesh of the bird, and draw the pork half way through, so that the ends of the strips exposed will be of equal length. The strips should be about one inch apart. The larding interferes with the natural flavor of the bird, but renders it more juicy. Many prefer tying a piece of bacon on the breast instead. Pigeons should be cooked a long time, as they are usually quite lean and tough, and they are better to lie in salt water half an hour, or to be parboiled in it for a few minutes. They are nice roasted or made into a pie.
If the "wild flavor" of the larger birds, such as pheasants, prairie chickens, etc., is disliked, they may be soaked over night in salt water, or two or three hours in soda and water, or parboiled with an onion or two in the water, and then cooked as desired. The coarser kinds of game, such as geese, ducks, etc., may lie in salt water for several hours, or be parboiled in it with an onion inside each to absorb the rank flavor, and afterwards thoroughly rinsed in clear water, stuffed and roasted; or pare a fresh lemon without breaking the thin, white, inside skin, put inside the game for a day or two, renewing the lemon every twelve hours. This will absorb unpleasant flavors from almost all meat and game. Some lay slices of onion over game while cooking, and remove before serving. In 66 preparing Yas wild ducks for invalids, it is a good plan to remove the skin, and keep a day or two before cooking. Squirrels should be carefully skinned and laid in salt water a short time before cooking; if old, parboil. They are delicious broiled, and are excellent cooked in any way with thin slices of bacon. Venison, as in the days of good old Isaac, is still justly considered a " savoury dish." The haunch, neck, shoulder and saddle should be roasted; roast or broil the breast, and fry or broil the steaks with slices of salt pork. Venison requires more time for cooking than beefsteak. The hams are excellent pickled, smoked and dried, but they will not keep so long as other smoked meats.
The garnishes for game are fresh or preserved barberries, currant jelly, sliced oranges, and apple sauce.
A four-line fig compote from a Georgia contributor, followed on the same page by the book's long essay on dressing and cooking game — the two are unrelated and the run-together text is an artifact of the original page layout. The fig recipe carries one seasoning that cannot be used today.
- Bitter almondsThe suggested "few bitter almonds" are not a variety of snacking almond. They contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted, and eating them raw in any quantity risks serious poisoning, with children at much greater risk. Their sale for eating is prohibited in the United States and restricted elsewhere; nineteenth-century cooks used them freely for their marzipan-like perfume, though the toxicity of prussic acid was itself understood at the time. Use a current recipe for stewed figs rather than adapting this one.
- Two hours of cookingThe long timing suits dried figs, which need slow rehydration; fresh figs soften far faster and can collapse to jam. The original does not say which is meant, and the answer changes the water and the timing.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a hard cone, chipped or nipped off in lumps and weighed. Two ounces to a pound of fruit is a restrained hand by period standards — roughly a quarter cup by volume — which suits figs, already among the sweetest fruits.
- "A glass" of portAn unfixed measure in this period. A wine glass of the 1880s held rather less than a modern one; contemporary cookbooks generally treat it as about a quarter of a cup, but the original gives no quantity you can rely on.
- Where the recipe endsThe recipe finishes at "orange-peel. — A Georgia housekeeper." Everything after that belongs to the book's general essay on game: hanging birds, dry-picking, larding with salt pork, soaking wild duck to draw out rankness. None of it applies to the figs.
- The game notes are period practice, not guidanceThe advice to steep tainted birds in new milk for twenty-four hours to make them "quite sweet" reflects a pre-refrigeration household with no notion of bacterial spoilage. Meat that has gone off is not rescued by soaking.
Figs grow readily across the lower South, and a Georgia dooryard tree could bury a household in fruit for a few weeks each summer — which is why Southern receipt books of the period are thick with fig preserves, fig pickle, fig leather and fig sauce, all of them ways of holding a glut of highly perishable fruit. Still, the book closes its game notes by listing barberries, currant jelly, sliced oranges and apple sauce as the proper garnishes, and a sharp-sweet fruit sauce served alongside roast venison or wildfowl belongs to the same long tradition. The Dixie Cook-Book, compiled in the 1880s from the contributions of named and unnamed Southern housekeepers, is typical in crediting recipes only by region and role — "A Georgia housekeeper" is as much attribution as most of its contributors received.