No. 2569

Woodcock Pie

Pate de Becasses

Bone six woodcocks, remove the pouches and gizzards, and fry the intestines by mixing in with them two pounds of game forcemeat (No. 67); pound and pass them through a sieve. Fry the fragments of the birds in butter with a small mirepoix of onions, carrots, thyme, bay leaf and celery root, all cut in small dice. Bone twelve larks, season and fill them with the boned turkey forcemeat mixed with their intestines previously fried in butter; press through a sieve, and season with fine spices (No. 168) and brandy. Line a pie mold with pie paste (No. 144); cover the bottom and sides with thin slices of fat pork, and at the bottom lay three of the woodcocks and six of the larks; then another bed of the forcemeat, the three other woodcocks and the six other larks; finish with more forcemeat and a bard of fat pork; wet the inside edge, cover with a flat of paste, and fasten it down; smooth the top nicely, pinch it all around and on the summit, and bake in a moderate oven; when cold fill the pie with partly cold jelly (No. 103) prepared with game fumet (No. 397).

← No. 2568 Veal and Ham Pie Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2570 Pig's Head →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a Delmonico's kitchen recipe written for a brigade with a game larder, and it cannot be reproduced legally in the United States or most of Europe. The notes below explain the obstacles and decode the terms rather than adapting the method.

Larks are protected birdsThe twelve larks at the heart of this pie are songbirds. The taking, killing, possession or sale of native larks and comparable passerines is prohibited in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and skylarks are protected in Europe under the Birds Directive, though a few member states have permitted limited traditional lark hunting or trapping under derogations. There is no ordinary commercial supply, and the recipe collapses without them.
Woodcock is not a market birdAmerican woodcock is a migratory game species with a licensed season and a daily bag limit, and its sale is prohibited. Six birds at once is a substantial share of a hunter's allowance in most states. Ranhofer wrote in an era when wild game moved freely through commercial markets; that trade was ended by the Lacey Act and the treaty acts that followed.
The undrawn trailWoodcock are traditionally cooked with the intestines in, the "trail" being prized; here it is fried and sieved into the forcemeat. Only the pouch (crop) and gizzard are discarded. This is deliberate and not an oversight, but it is a practice that depends entirely on birds handled and drawn within hours of shooting.
If you want a raised game pieUse a current recipe built on lawfully sold birds. Nothing in this entry needs correcting so much as replacing.
Reading the cross-referencesRanhofer's numbers point elsewhere in The Epicurean: No. 67 is game forcemeat, No. 144 the pie paste, No. 168 his "fine spices" blend, No. 103 the aspic jelly and No. 397 the game fumet. The recipe is unreadable without the parent volume, which is how the book was designed to work.
VocabularyA mirepoix here is the diced aromatic base, not a finished garnish. A bard is a sheet of fat pork laid over the meat to keep it from drying. A flat of paste is the rolled pastry lid. A pie mold is a straight-sided raised-pie mould, often the hinged tin sort, rather than a shallow pie dish.
"A moderate oven"The term was not a fixed temperature; it is usually read today as somewhere around 325-350F. A mould of this size would have wanted a long bake, judged by the cook rather than a clock.
The jellyPouring cooled, still-liquid aspic into the baked pie fills the gap left as the meat shrinks and seals the pie against air. It is the usual finish for the cold raised pies in the book.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this pie belongs to the grandest end of it: a cold centrepiece for a buffet, meant to be sliced and admired rather than served hot. Pâté de bécasses is a French country and restaurant tradition of long standing, and the inclusion of the woodcock's trail follows the old rule that the bird is too fine to be drawn. The larks are the detail that dates the page most precisely. Small songbirds were sold by the dozen in nineteenth-century American and European markets, and lark pies appear routinely in cookbooks of the period; the trade in them, and in wild game generally, was closed off in the United States by the Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. A recipe that was simply an expensive order in 1894 became an impossible one within a generation.