Snipe
Snipe are best roasted with a piece of pork tied to the breast, or they may be stuffed and baked.-Mrs. M. R.
Two sentences of instruction and no numbers at all, which was typical for game entries in nineteenth-century American cookbooks: the writer assumed you already knew how a small bird behaved in an oven. Here is what the entry leaves unsaid.
- The hinge: heat and speedA snipe weighs only a few ounces and is ruined by a long roast. Cook in a hot oven, around 450F, for roughly 10 to 15 minutes, and rest the bird before serving. The entry itself gives no temperature; nineteenth-century books that did specify would call something in this range a "quick oven," though the modern equivalent is only approximate.
- What the pork is doingSnipe breast has almost no fat, so a thin sheet of salt pork or fatback tied over it bastes the meat as it renders. Modern bacon works but brings smoke and sugar; unsmoked fatback or barding fat is closer to the original. Remove the covering for the last few minutes if you want colour on the skin.
- Legality firstMost North American and European shorebirds are protected and cannot be taken or sold. Wilson's snipe remains a legal game bird in much of the United States under season, bag limit and licence, and common snipe in parts of Europe; nothing sold in a supermarket will be snipe. Confirm the species and the local rules before anything else.
- An easy substituteQuail is the standard stand-in: similar size, similar leanness, farmed and widely available. Treat it exactly as described here, barded and roasted hot and fast.
- The trailSnipe were classically roasted undrawn, with the entrails left in and the long bill skewered through the bird, the softened "trail" spread on toast beneath. The entry does not say either way, and its "stuffed and baked" alternative implies a drawn bird. If undrawn is not to your taste, draw the bird; the recipe still works.
- "Stuffed and baked"The alternative reading is a bread-and-herb stuffing in a drawn bird. Keep it to a spoonful — a packed cavity slows the cooking enough to dry the breast, which is the one thing this bird cannot survive.
- DonenessTraditional practice serves snipe distinctly pink. Wild birds carry the ordinary risks of wild game; if that matters to you, take the breast to 165F and accept a firmer, drier result.
- YieldTwo birds per person as a main course, one as a first course, served on toast or fried bread to catch the juices.
Snipe belonged to the long American tradition of market gunning, when wild waterfowl and shorebirds were shot commercially and sold by the dozen in city markets — a trade that collapsed in the early twentieth century under the Lacey Act and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which is why a bird that once merited a casual two-line entry is now a rarity outside hunting households. The attribution to "Mrs. M. R." marks this as a contributed receipt, the community-cookbook format in which a household sent in what it actually did, at whatever length it thought sufficient. The bird's name is often said to derive from a Germanic root describing its long bill, though the etymology is uncertain, and its erratic flight gave English the word sniper, for the marksman skilled enough to hit one.