No. 2161

Sand Snipe Roasted with Water-Cress

Petites Becassines de Sable Roties au Cresson

Pick and singe a dozen sand snipe without drawing them; cover with very thin small slices of fat pork, and run a thin hatelet or skewer into them one after the other. Lay them on a baking sheet, pour good fat over and roast in a quick oven; when done salt and dress in pairs on bread croutons, three inches long by one and a half wide covered over with butter; pour over some clear gravy (No. 404) and decorate with water-cress. Serve.

← No. 2160 Snipe Stuffed, Bordelaise Quail, Snipe, Woodcock & Small Birds No. 2162 Thrushes Andrieux →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a market-hunting dish from an era when small shorebirds were sold by the dozen. The obstacles now are legal and sanitary rather than culinary.

The birds are protected"Sand snipe" was a market name for small shorebirds — sandpipers, dunlin, yellowlegs and their relatives — not for the Wilson's snipe that remains a game bird in parts of North America. Nearly all of these species are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and equivalent European and UK legislation; taking, selling or possessing them is an offence, and no substitute is offered here.
Cooked undrawn, by designThe birds are neither gutted nor cleaned, on the old principle that the trail of a snipe or woodcock is part of the eating. Intact viscera carry the gut flora of the whole bird into a very short roast, and the intestinal contents of wild shorebirds are a recognised reservoir of Campylobacter and Salmonella. Nothing in the method brings that interior to a safe temperature.
"Quick oven" and a very short roast"Quick oven" and a short roast -- A quick oven in Ranhofer's kitchen is generally taken to mean something in the region of 400–450F. The recipe gives no time, only "when done," but birds this small would be out fast and deliberately rare at the breast. That is the point of the dish and also the reason it cannot be recommended: no part of the method is intended to reach a pasteurising temperature.
Lead shotBirds shot for the nineteenth-century market were taken with lead, and small birds eaten whole off the bone deliver whatever shot remains. Lead shot over wetlands is now banned in many jurisdictions for precisely this reason.
The supporting elementsThe fat pork barding, the hatelet (a decorative skewer, here doing plain work), the buttered crouton and the clear gravy of No. 404 are all ordinary and unobjectionable. They belong to a general method for small game birds that a current recipe for legally taken quail or snipe will cover properly.
If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a lawfully sourced game bird, drawn and cooked to a temperature you have measured.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer cooked at Delmonico's through the decades when American shorebirds were a commodity: barrels of plover, dunlin, curlew and "sand snipe" moved from the Atlantic flyway into New York's markets, cheap enough that a dozen tiny birds could be treated as a single garnished course. The Epicurean (1894) reflects that abundance, giving whole sequences of recipes for thrushes, ortolans, reedbirds and snipe that no modern kitchen can reproduce. The abundance did not last — market gunning helped drive the Eskimo curlew to extinction and pushed several other shorebirds to the edge — and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended the trade in the United States. The French title's au cresson points to the one durable convention here: roast game birds are still sent out on a bed of watercress, whose pepperiness was thought to answer the richness of the fat and the dark meat.