Broiled Grouse
Take a well hung bird, prepared as for roasting, cut off the pinions and legs and tuck the thighs inside the body. Split it down the back, press flat, season with red pepper, and salt, and brush over with clarified butter. Set the bird on a gridiron over a clear fire and broil without smoking until properly cooked. Brush over with glaze, set on a hot dish and garnish with potato ribbons. Mix a teaspoonful of anchovy sauce with one ounce of fresh butter and set it on the hot dish under the grouse. Squeeze a little lemon over first before sending to table.
A spatchcocked game bird over live coals, finished with anchovy butter — the technique carries over cleanly, but the bird, the fire and the garnish all need translating.
- The hinge: cook it fast and stop earlyGrouse is very lean and turns dry and livery within a minute or two of overcooking. Many cooks take the breast to about 130-135F and let it rest, well short of the 165F usually advised for poultry. Note that the recipe cuts the legs off altogether and tucks only the thighs into the body.
- "Well hung"In this period that meant a bird aged in feather in a cool larder for anywhere from three days to over a week, to tenderise and deepen the flavour. Birds sold today are almost always hung briefly and chilled under refrigeration. If someone hands you an unplucked bird, hang it refrigerated, not in a shed.
- Sourcing the birdWild-shot grouse cannot be sold commercially in the United States — it comes from a hunter or from an importer of Scottish red grouse in season. A pair of quail or a small poussin, split and flattened the same way, takes the same treatment, though neither has the same flavour.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not sweet pepper. A light dusting; it is there to sharpen the anchovy butter, not to dominate.
- Gridiron, and "without smoking"A clear fire means coals burned down past the flame, so dripping butter does not flare and soot the skin. On a gas or charcoal grill, set the bird over indirect heat with the lid down and finish skin-side over the coals. A cast-iron grill pan or an oven broiler at full heat works, about 6-8 minutes a side depending on size.
- Clarified butter and glazeClarified butter is called for because whole butter scorches over coals. "Glaze" here is meat glaze — brown game or veal stock reduced to a syrup that sets tacky when cool — brushed on at the end for gloss and savour. A tablespoon of reduced demi-glace does the job.
- Potato ribbonsLong peeler-cut strips of potato, soaked, dried and deep-fried at about 350F until crisp. A close relative of the game chips still served with roast grouse.
- Anchovy butterOne ounce is two tablespoons of butter; mash the anchovy sauce (Gentleman's Relish or a mashed anchovy fillet with a drop of vinegar substitutes) into softened butter and let it melt under the hot bird. It replaces a sauce entirely.
- YieldOne grouse per person. Bread sauce, watercress and a slice of fried bread set under the bird are the traditional English accompaniments, though this recipe calls for none of them.
Grouse belongs to the sporting calendar rather than the market: the British season opens on 12 August, the "Glorious Twelfth," and American cookbooks of this period drew heavily on English game cookery. That inheritance is visible in every line here — the gridiron over a clear fire, the meat glaze, the anchovy butter melting under the bird, the fried potato ribbons standing in for game chips. Anchovy with game birds was a common Victorian pairing, the same instinct that put anchovy in beef sauces and in Gentleman's Relish; a salty, fermented note was thought to lift dark, iron-rich meat. A late-nineteenth-century American household cookbook carrying a game chapter at all says something about its intended reader: someone with access to shot birds, either from a household sportsman or from the game dealers who then supplied city markets. Market hunting collapsed in the decades that followed, and much of what these chapters assumed you could buy was gone from commerce for good.