Partridge Pie
Parboil six partridges; line a deep dish or baking-pan with a rich biscuit crust, put in partridges, one dozen oysters, one tablespoon of butter, salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste, fill up with water in which birds were parboiled, cover with paste, and bake half an hour.- Mrs. Hal Johnson, Jacksonville, Fla.
A late-nineteenth-century game pie that assumes a hunter's kitchen and a cook who knows her stove. The two things to watch are the birds' doneness and the oysters' texture.
- Oysters last, not firstA dozen shucked oysters need only two or three minutes of heat; buried in filling under a crust for half an hour they turn to rubber. Add them raw so they finish just as the crust colors, or fold them in with their liquor near the end if you are baking the filling longer.
- Partridge substitutionWild partridge (in American usage often ruffed grouse or bobwhite quail) is not a supermarket bird. Depending on the species, six birds could mean anywhere from roughly 2 to 5 lb of dressed meat; Cornish hens or split quail can stand in, but match them by weight rather than by count. Farmed guinea fowl is often suggested as the nearest commercial match in flavor.
- Parboil properlyThe parboil does double duty: it tenderizes tough legs and makes the stock that fills the pie. Simmer the birds 20-30 minutes rather than a token blanch, and skim the broth before it goes back into the dish. Half an hour under a crust will not cook a raw wild bird through.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. A biscuit crust wants 400-425F so it rises and browns in the half hour specified; below that it goes pale and soaks.
- "Rich biscuit crust" and "paste""Rich biscuit crust" and "paste" most likely refer to the same dough here, a baking-powder biscuit dough enriched with butter or lard, rolled thick; "paste" was the general period word for pastry. A bottom liner in a deep dish will steam rather than crisp, and some cooks skip it and use a top crust only.
- Nutmeg quantityNutmeg with poultry and oysters is a period signature and a small amount goes far. A quarter teaspoon of freshly grated is plenty for a pie this size.
- YieldSix birds and a full crust serves six to eight as a main course, with a green vegetable and nothing else competing.
Game pies fill several pages of American community cookbooks of the 1870s-1890s because wild birds were still market goods rather than trophies; city stalls sold quail, grouse and wildfowl by the dozen in season. The pairing of birds with oysters, which reads as extravagant now, was thrift in its day: oysters were cheap and abundant along the whole Atlantic and Gulf coast, and their liquor gave a lean game pie the savor and body that a fatty domestic fowl would have supplied on its own. The Dixie Cook-Book was assembled from contributed receipts, and the attribution to Mrs. Hal Johnson of Jacksonville is typical of the form: a signed household recipe, brief to the point of assuming the reader already knows how her mother made biscuit dough. Market hunting on this scale collapsed in the early twentieth century, which is why a recipe calling for six partridges now reads as a document of a vanished food economy.