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M.a.t (Put an onion salt and hot)
体 Put an onion, salt and hot water into a pan, and baste for ten or fifteen minutes; change the pan; put in a slice of salt pork and baste with butter and pork drippings very often; just before serving dredge lightly with flour and baste. Ducks take from twenty-five to thirty-five minutes to roast, and woodcock and snipe fifteen to twenty-five. Do not draw or take off the heads of either. Garnish with fried or toasted bread, lemon, parsley, and currant jelly.
This is the tail end of a set of directions for roasting wild fowl, and it assumes a cook who already knows how to truss a bird and manage a spit or a hot oven. The two-pan method is the part worth understanding: the first pan is a brief aromatic steam, the second is the actual roast.
- The two pansThe onion, salt and hot water in the first pan appear to be a short steam-baste rather than the roasting itself; the usual period reason given for such a step with strong-flavoured wild birds is to soften the rank taste. Change to a dry pan before the fat goes in, or the skin will never colour.
- No temperature is givenGame was generally roasted fast and hot in this period. A hot oven, in the region of 450F, is the only reading under which twenty-five to thirty-five minutes for a duck makes sense; at 350F the times here would be far too short.
- Salt porkThe slice of salt pork supplies the fat that lean wild birds lack. Commercial salt pork can be very salty, so taste or rinse it and go easy on any additional salt. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or a sheet of pork fatback laid over the breast does the same job.
- "Do not draw"Serving woodcock and snipe undrawn, with the trail inside and the head on, was standard sporting practice and is the single instruction most modern cooks will decline. Wild birds carry Salmonella and Campylobacter, and the gut contents of a bird shot in the field are not something to leave in place. Draw the birds and cook the breast to 165F.
- ShotAny bird taken with shot may carry pellets and lead fragments well away from the wound channel. Check the cavity and warn whoever is eating.
- The flour dredgeDredging lightly with flour just before the end and basting once more is a period trick for a crisp, faintly glazed skin. It works, but only if the bird is already dry-roasting in fat — flour into a wet pan makes paste.
- GarnishFried or toasted bread was commonly a crouton set under each bird to catch the drippings, though the recipe says only that it garnishes the dish. Currant jelly served alongside is the traditional foil to dark game meat; a tart red currant or cranberry preserve will do.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. By convention a duck is taken to serve two, and woodcock and snipe are reckoned one bird per person, sometimes two.
Fast, hot, heavily basted roasting of wild duck, woodcock and snipe was a fixture of nineteenth-century American household cookery, in the decades when market hunting still put wild fowl on ordinary tables and a book like this could treat snipe as casually as it treated chicken. The instruction to leave the birds undrawn and the heads on belongs to a European sporting tradition that regarded the trail of a woodcock as the best part of it, and the head is often said to have served as proof of what the bird was. Currant jelly with game is older still, generally traced to English practice, where a sharp fruit preserve was thought to correct the richness of dark, fat-basted meat. That so many of these birds are now either closely regulated or entirely off the table is a reminder of how much the game supply changed after this book's period.