Truss two partridges after singeing, drawing and cleaning them well; lard them and roast either on the spit or in the oven. Let get cold, and when ready to use glaze them over with a brush dipped in game glaze (No. 398), and dress, either whole or cut up, on a dish and surround with jelly.
A cold buffet piece from Ranhofer's Delmonico repertoire: two small birds roasted, chilled, lacquered with glaze and set among chopped aspic. Nothing here is difficult, but almost every step assumes equipment and larder stock that a modern kitchen no longer keeps.
Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits in a chapter of garnishings for cold dishes — the decorative anchors of the late nineteenth-century buffet, where glazed birds, galantines and molded aspics were arranged on platters and eaten at leisure. Larding was standard treatment for any lean game bird before modern brining and low-temperature roasting offered other ways to keep it moist. Partridge is likely to have reached American tables both from domestic shooting and, in the great restaurants, from Europe; the numbered cross-references to a game glaze and to a companion "pain" of rabbit show how thoroughly the book assumes a brigade with stocks, reductions and aspics already standing ready in the larder.