No. 2567

Snipe Pie

Pate de Becassines

Peel and cook some truffles in a little Madeira wine, cut them in four and season; singe and bone ten snipe, season them, and with their intestines, a few good chicken livers, some fragments of ham and aromatic herbs, prepare a baking forcemeat (No. 64). Have a chopped game forcemeat (No. 67), pound and mix with it the baking forcemeat in equal quantity, a bit of garlic, and the truffle parings; force the whole through a sieve. With some cold pie paste (No. 144) line a low-hinged bottomless mold, place it on a baking sheet over buttered paper, and cover the bottom and sides with the prepared forcemeat; in the hollow center dress the snipe, alternated with more of the chopped forcemeat and the quartered truffles; pile up the mold, cover with thin bards of fat pork, then with a layer of the same paste, fastening it on the edge of the under paste; cut it away evenly and pinch the edges; make a small hole in the top of the dome and decorate the latter with a few imitation noodle paste leaves (No. 142), then egg over both top and border. Cook the pie for an hour and a half to two hours in a moderate oven; after it has been removed pour into the hole on top some game fumet (No. 397) and finish it the same as a duckling pie (No. 2555). Let it be remembered that if all game pies, such as partridge, pheasant, reedbird, etc., have a slight bit of garlic mixed in with the forcemeat it will add greatly to the aroma, that is if it be not too predominant.

← No. 2566 Salmon Pie Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2568 Veal and Ham Pie →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a professional garde-manger brigade with a numbered cross-reference system, so the page assumes you already have forcemeats, fumet and pie paste on hand. The essentials translate cleanly if you know what the terms mean.

The hinge of the dishThis reads as a pâté-en-croûte-style pie meant to be eaten cold. The fumet poured through the steam hole sets to a jelly as the pie cools, filling the gap left by shrinkage; Ranhofer has it go in as soon as the pie leaves the oven, and the pie is then left to cool thoroughly before it is cut.
"Moderate oven"The book gives no figures; a moderate oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 325-350F. At an hour and a half to two hours the pastry is doing as much work as the filling; a forcemeat pie of this depth wants an internal reading of 165F at the centre, which will usually come well before the two-hour mark.
SnipeWilson's snipe is a legal migratory game bird in the United States but is not sold commercially, so realistically this comes from a hunter. Ten dressed snipe amount to very little meat: the birds weigh only a few ounces each, so the boned yield is well under a pound in total. Quail or squab are the usual stand-ins and behave the same way in a raised pie.
"With their intestines"Snipe and woodcock were traditionally cooked undrawn, the trail being prized for flavour. If you keep it, remove the gizzard, and use only birds you know were cleanly killed and promptly chilled. Chicken livers alone make a perfectly good baking forcemeat if you would rather not.
Bards of fat porkThin sheets of unsmoked back fat or fatback, cut about an eighth of an inch thick. Caul fat is an acceptable substitute. Their job is to keep the top of the filling from drying during a long bake, and they stay in the finished pie.
Low-hinged bottomless moldA pâté en croûte mold: a hinged metal band with no base, clipped shut around pastry laid directly on a paper-lined sheet. A springform ring with the base removed does the same job. The point is that the sides come away without inverting the pie.
Truffles in MadeiraFresh black truffles were a routine Delmonico's line item and are now a serious expense. Preserved truffles in their own juice, warmed briefly in Madeira, are the practical version; the parings going into the forcemeat is the frugal touch worth keeping.
The garlicRanhofer's closing note is the useful part of the whole entry: a very small amount of garlic in a game forcemeat lifts the aroma, and too much flattens it. For this quantity of meat, half a clove, pounded to paste, is the outer limit.
YieldCut cold in thin wedges as part of a buffet, a pie of this size serves sixteen to twenty. It keeps four or five days refrigerated once the jelly has set and sealed it.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the raised game pie sits at the centre of the nineteenth-century cold table: baked in a freestanding crust, filled with aspic, decorated with cut paste leaves, and displayed rather than merely served. Snipe belonged to a class of small wild birds that American restaurants bought by the barrel from market gunners, alongside reedbirds, plover and canvasback, and Ranhofer's casual instruction to bone ten of them says a good deal about what the supply looked like. That trade did not last. The Lacey Act of 1900 and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended the commercial sale of wild migratory birds in the United States, and recipes like this one became historical almost within a generation of publication. The practice of cooking snipe and woodcock undrawn, with the trail spread on toast or worked into the forcemeat, is older still and survives in European game cookery, where the birds' largely clean diet was the traditional justification.