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Roast Snipe on Toast
Pick, singe, draw and stick a toothpick across the legs under the breasts of six fat, fresh snipes (keep the livers for further use). Pick out the eyes of each bird. Rub well with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Arrange a slice thin, lean bacon around each. Lay them in a lightly buttered tin and roast in the oven for ten minutes. Hash the six livers very finely with two shallots and one teaspoon chopped parsley, neatly spread this preparation on top of six small toasts, place the toasts in the oven for two minutes. Remove both from the oven, arrange the toasts on a hot dish, lay the snipe on the toast. Pour one-quarter gill water into the tin pan, cook it for three minutes on the range, pour the gravy over the birds and serve with a little watercress around the dish.
A Delmonico-style game preparation that assumes a cook who handles wild birds daily. The gaps to fill are the oven temperature, the sourcing, and what "ten minutes" is actually meant to achieve.
- Sourcing the birdsWild snipe cannot be bought in the United States: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act ended commercial trade in migratory game birds, so the only legal supply is a licensed hunter's own bag. Farmed quail, four to five ounces each, are the practical stand-in and cook on roughly the same schedule.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the original. For birds this small the sense of the instruction is a quick oven; something in the region of 450F is the usual modern reading, so the outside colors before the interior overcooks. At 350F ten minutes will steam rather than roast them.
- What ten minutes meansFilippini is aiming at rare breast meat, which is how snipe and woodcock were and still are served in the classical repertoire. If that is not what you want, cook to your own judgment rather than stretching the time in the same hot oven, which dries the birds without much improving the legs.
- A quarter gillA gill is half a cup, so a quarter gill is two tablespoons. It is there to deglaze the pan, not to make a sauce of any volume, and three minutes on the range should reduce it to a spoonful of pan juice per bird.
- Draw, singe, pick out the eyesSnipe were often roasted undrawn with the trail left in, so the instruction to draw them is deliberate. Singeing burns off the pinfeathers a plucked skin always retains. The instruction to pick out the eyes implies the heads are being left on, though the recipe does not say so or describe how they are arranged.
- The liversSix snipe livers amount to perhaps a tablespoon in total. Chopped raw with shallot and parsley and spread on toast, they get two minutes in the oven plus whatever heat the birds pass down, which will leave them well short of cooked through. If you are working with quail, quail livers do the same job; chicken liver is coarser but usable.
- YieldSix birds on six toasts serve six as a first course, or three as a main. The watercress is dressed with nothing in the original; a few drops of the pan juice is enough.
Snipe belonged to the short list of birds that nineteenth-century restaurant cooking treated as luxuries in their own right, alongside woodcock, ortolan and canvasback, and their appearance in a general household book marks it as a book with one eye on the restaurant. The Wilson's snipe of North America and the common snipe of Europe were shot in quantity by market gunners and sold by the dozen in city stalls, which is why a recipe can casually call for six fat, fresh birds and their livers besides; that trade was ended in the United States by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, and no cook today can simply order them. The bird gave English the word sniper, from the difficulty of hitting something that flies in a fast zigzag. The method itself, barded, blasted in a hot oven and set on a liver-spread croute to catch the juices, is the standard classical treatment for small game birds and had already been fixed by French practice well before this book set it down.