No. 2199

Woodcocks a la Dumas

Becasses a la Dumas

Pick, singe and truss eight woodcocks, put them into a saucepan with fresh butter and fry over a brisk fire, adding chopped shallots, salt, pepper and nutmeg. When the birds are cooked drain off the fat, add to their stock the juice of one lemon, a quarter of a bottleful of champagne and half a pint of espagnole sauce (No. 414); reduce and put in some whole truffles, cocks'-combs and kidneys. Dress the woodcocks on some stuffed crusts (No. 51) and place the garnishing around.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A brisk sauté of small game birds finished with a reduced champagne-and-espagnole sauce, written for a brigade with a stockpot always going. The sauce work, not the birds, is where the time goes.

Sourcing the birdsWoodcock are migratory game and cannot legally be bought or sold in the United States; the same is broadly true across Europe, where they move only through licensed game dealers in season. Unless a hunter hands them to you, cook quail, squab or snipe instead and treat the recipe as a method.
The hinge: do not overcookWoodcock are lean and small, and a "brisk fire" cooks them fast. Ranhofer gives no time; a few minutes a side, turning, with the breast still rosy, suits the bird. Past that the flesh turns dry and livery. Pull the birds out, then build the sauce in the pan.
Undrawn birdsThe instruction stops at pick, singe and truss because woodcock were traditionally roasted with the intestines in, the head skinned and skewered through the thighs. If your birds arrive whole, the trail can be scraped out after cooking, mashed with butter and spread on the crusts.
Stuffed crusts (No. 51)Ranhofer sends you to his own numbered preparation; croustades of this sort are generally shaped bread crusts, fried and spread with a forcemeat. Thick-cut bread rounds fried in butter and spread with chicken-liver purée give a similar result.
MeasurementsA quarter of a bottleful of champagne is about 6 fl oz; use anything dry and sparkling, or a still dry white. Half a pint of espagnole is 1 cup in Ranhofer's American measure. Espagnole is the brown mother sauce, veal stock thickened with brown roux and mirepoix; a good reduced brown veal stock, lightly bound, stands in.
Cocks'-combs and kidneysThe "kidneys" here are cocks' testicles (rognons de coq); both they and the combs were common nineteenth-century garnishes, the combs needing blanching and peeling before use. Both are hard to source today outside specialty suppliers. Truffle alone, or truffle with sautéed mushroom caps, keeps the dish's intent.
ReductionDrain the fat completely before adding the lemon, wine and espagnole, or the sauce will not tighten. Reduce until it coats a spoon, then add the truffles off the boil so they perfume the sauce rather than cook out.
YieldEight woodcock serve eight as a game course, or four as a main. Quail run smaller, so allow two per person.

A Little History

The dish is generally said to honor Alexandre Dumas père, whose Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine appeared posthumously in 1873 and cemented his standing as a novelist whom cooks took seriously; nineteenth-century restaurant dishes often carried his name in tribute rather than by his invention. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years and published The Epicurean in 1894, gives woodcock an entire run of preparations, which says something about how the bird was regarded: long-billed, dark-fleshed, hunted in autumn migration, and prized above nearly all other game for its strong flavor. The champagne, truffles, cocks'-combs and espagnole together mark this as haute cuisine of the period at full stretch, the kind of plate assembled from a dozen components already standing ready in a large brigade kitchen. That woodcock is now so hard to come by commercially, available only through licensed European game dealers, is the clearest measure of how much has changed since.