Pick, singe, remove the gizzard and pouch and truss the snipe thrusting the feet inside; cover the breast with a very thin slice of fat pork and cross over this as well as the joint of the thick part of the leg with the beak. Roast them from six to eight minutes, dress on slices of toast, pour the gravy over and garnish with water-cress.
Ranhofer assumes a professional larder, a spit or a very hot range oven, and a bird a modern cook has to be given rather than buy. The whole dish turns on the roasting time: a snipe weighs a few ounces and is ruined by anything approaching a normal poultry schedule.
"English snipe" was the standard nineteenth-century American market name for what is now called Wilson's snipe, the common North American bird, and the recipe title's Becassines Anglaises is simply Ranhofer's French rendering of the trade term rather than a claim about English cookery. The Epicurean (1894) collects the kitchen practice of Delmonico's in New York, where Charles Ranhofer was chef for decades, and it appeared at the end of an era when wild snipe, plover, woodcock and reed-birds were bought by the dozen from market gunners and turned up on restaurant menus as a matter of course. Federal protection of migratory birds in the following decades closed that trade for good, which is why a page of casual snipe recipes reads today as a document of a vanished supply chain. The barding, the beak used as a skewer and the slice of toast set under the bird to catch the juices are all standard European small-game technique of the period, generally traced to French practice and repeated with little change in the English and American cookbooks that followed.