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Roast Woodcocks
Pick and singe three large or six small woodcocks, remove the skin from the heads, pick out the eyes, neatly draw and wipe, truss up the feet, skewer them with the bills, lay a very thin slice larding pork over each breast, place them on a roasting tin, spread a little melted butter over the birds, sprinkle half teaspoon salt over them, then set in a brisk oven for twelve minutes. Finely chop the livers and hearts with two chicken livers and one shallot, place on a plate with half teaspoon chopped parsley, two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon white pepper, mix well. Prepare six toasts, quarter inch thick and two inches square, then evenly spread the force over the six toasts, sprinkle a little bread crumbs over and lay them in a tin, then set in oven for three minutes. Remove, arrange on hot dish, dress the woodcocks on top, decorate with six small pieces of lemon and little watercress and serve.
This is a Delmonico-style game course from an era when woodcock were sold in markets and served deliberately rare. Two things put it outside modern practice, and one of them is the toast rather than the bird.
- The raw liver force is the problemThe chopped woodcock and chicken livers are mixed raw with shallot and seasoning, spread on toast, and given three minutes in the oven — enough to set the crumbs and nothing more. Poultry liver is a well-documented carrier of Campylobacter, which survives in the interior of a liver that is only surface-warmed. Follow a current recipe for a liver spread or parfait, which will specify a cooked internal temperature.
- Twelve minutes is intentional, not a misprintWoodcock was traditionally served with the breast red and the juices running, and a brisk oven for twelve minutes gives exactly that. Modern guidance for wild game birds is a fully cooked interior; the original timing is not a safe target.
- You cannot buy the birdAmerican woodcock is a migratory game bird. In the United States the Migratory Bird Treaty Act prohibits its sale, so the only legal source is a licensed hunter's own bag taken in season. Nineteenth-century markets sold them openly; that trade is what the Act ended.
- Saltspoon and brisk ovenA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the force carries about half a teaspoon of salt and a quarter teaspoon of white pepper. The recipe gives no temperature; "brisk" in period usage is generally taken to mean a hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-450F.
- Larding porkThe "very thin slice larding pork" is fatback or unsmoked salt pork, sliced almost translucent — not bacon, which brings smoke and cure into a dish built on the bird's own flavour. Fresh pork fatback from a butcher is the equivalent product.
- Skewered with the billsTrussing a woodcock by passing its own long bill through the thighs is a genuine period presentation, not a flourish of the writer's. It is why the heads are skinned and the eyes removed rather than the heads discarded.
- YieldSix toasts against three large or six small birds; the recipe does not state a number of servings, so a toast per person implies six portions at most.
The International Cook Book belongs to the Delmonico's tradition of American hotel cookery, and this recipe carries all its marks — the tiny squares of toast, the watercress and lemon, the assumption that the reader can lay hands on woodcock by the half-dozen. Woodcock was among the most prized birds on nineteenth-century American restaurant menus, sold by market gunners in quantity each autumn. Classical practice generally left the bird undrawn so the "trail" could be spread on the toast beneath it, and the liver-and-heart force here is a tidied, drawn-bird version of the same idea: the toast is the point of the dish, catching what runs out of the breast. Commercial sale of wild migratory birds was ended in the United States by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which is why a recipe like this reads as archaeology rather than instruction — the market it was written for no longer exists.