No. 2156

Baked Snipe

Becassines au Gratin

Singe and bone twelve snipe leaving on the feet only as far as the phalanges, add a few chicken livers to the livers and intestines. Fry in butter, also one shallot, mushrooms, truffles and parsley all finely chopped, season with salt, pepper and nutmeg, set this aside to cool, then pound thoroughly. Pound a third as much panada (No. 121), add little by little six raw egg-yolks and the preparation; when thoroughly pounded, press the whole through a sieve and use half of it to fill the snipes, sew them up, truss and cover with fat pork; wrap them in paper and cook in the oven from ten to twelve minutes; when done, untie, untruss and lay them in a circle on a dish covered with the remainder of the forcemeat; fill the center with truffles, olives and mushrooms, cover with thick allemande sauce (No. 407), bestrew bread-crumbs and grated cheese on top and brown in moderate oven.

← No. 2155 Snipe-English-a la Waleski Quail, Snipe, Woodcock & Small Birds No. 2157 Broiled Snipe →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a mortar, a stockpot and a standing order of game birds. The dish is really two preparations — a fine gratin forcemeat and quickly roasted boned snipe — assembled and glazed at the last minute.

The hinge: do not overcook the birdsTen to twelve minutes is not a misprint. Snipe are tiny and lean, and the whole point of the final gratin is a short blast under heat to brown crumbs and cheese, not a second cooking. If the birds go into the oven a second time for long, they turn to dry fibre.
"Singe" and "phalanges"Singeing burns off the down and feather stubble left after plucking; a gas flame or kitchen torch does it. Leaving the feet "as far as the phalanges" appears to mean trimming at the toe joints so the slender legs stay attached for presentation.
The trailThe "livers and intestines" are what British cookery calls the trail, traditionally left in or used in the farce for snipe and woodcock because these birds have no crop and a very clean gut. Modern practice discards the intestines and keeps only liver and heart, which is no loss to the flavour of the forcemeat.
Panada, No. 121Ranhofer's panada is a stiff paste of bread or flour cooked in milk or stock, used to bind quenelle forcemeats. The recipe says only "a third as much" as the pounded liver mixture, without stating weight or volume; it should be cold and firm before pounding, or the farce will slacken.
Allemande sauce, No. 407A velouté of chicken or veal stock finished with an egg-yolk-and-cream liaison and lemon. It is not in most modern repertoires — it is essentially a thickened, enriched white sauce, and it must be thick enough to coat and hold the crumbs, not run off the birds.
Pounding, and the sieveA food processor replaces the mortar; work the cooled liver mixture and panada to a smooth paste, add the yolks one at a time, then push it through a fine drum sieve or tamis. Skipping the sieve leaves sinew and grit from the livers, and the gratin will be gritty rather than silky.
Fat pork and paper"Cover with fat pork" means bard the breasts with thin sheets of fatback or unsmoked salt pork; the paper wrap is a papillote that keeps the fat and juices in. Parchment does the job. Take both off before the final browning.
Oven temperatures"Moderate oven" is conventionally taken as around 350°F; the book gives no figure. For the initial ten to twelve minutes the birds want considerably hotter — 425–450°F is a reasonable modern setting — since they are wrapped and only need to be just cooked through.
Sourcing and yieldSnipe are not sold commercially in the United States; they come from a licensed hunter in season, and quail or small squab are the practical substitutes. The recipe gives no yield; twelve birds with this much forcemeat would plausibly serve six as a course.

A Little History

This is No. 2156 from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of his thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to a run of snipe recipes — English style, à la Waleski, broiled — that shows how routinely small wild birds passed through a first-class American kitchen in the 1880s and 90s. Market hunting supplied them by the barrel: snipe, woodcock, plover and reed-birds were ordinary restaurant stock, priced and listed like poultry. That trade ended with the Lacey Act and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which banned commercial sale of migratory game birds in the United States, so a page like this one is a record of a supply chain that no longer exists rather than a dish a cook can simply order ingredients for. The treatment itself — bone the bird, stuff it with a sieved forcemeat built on its own liver, sauce it and glaze it au gratin — is pure French haute cuisine of the Carême line, in which a wild bird's flavour is concentrated and then redistributed through the whole plate.