Larded Grouse
Clean and wash the birds, lard the legs and breast.
Run a small skewer into the legs and through the tail. Tie firmly with twine. Rub the breast with soft butter, dredge with salt; then dredge thickly with flour. Put in a quick oven; if to be very rare, cook twenty-one minutes to twentyeight; if wished better done, thirty-five minutes. When done, place on a hot dish, on which has been spread breadsauce.
A plain roast for a small game bird, written for cooks who bought grouse by the brace and knew what larding pork looked like. Two things carry the dish: real heat, and fat added where the bird has none.
- "A quick oven"A hot oven, roughly 400-450F by the ranges given in cookbooks of the period. The short cooking times only make sense at that kind of heat; at 350F the breast will dry before it colors.
- LardingLarding means threading strips of chilled pork fatback or fresh (unsmoked) fat salt pork through the flesh with a larding needle. Grouse breast is very lean and takes badly to dry heat, so this is the point of the recipe rather than a flourish. If you have no larding needle, barding — tying thin sheets of fatback or unsmoked bacon over the breast and legs — does most of the same work.
- The flour dredgeButter, salt, then a thick coat of flour forms a crust that shields the breast and browns fast. Dredge just before the bird goes in; flour applied early goes pasty.
- Skewer and twineA metal or bamboo skewer through both thighs and out past the tail holds the legs against the body so they cook at the same rate as the breast. Tie the whole thing snugly rather than trussing elaborately.
- Timing and donenessTwenty-one to twenty-eight minutes at high heat gives a rosy breast on a bird of roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb; thirty-five minutes gives it well done and, frankly, dry. Grouse is traditionally served pink. Check the thickest part of the breast rather than trusting the clock, since dressed weights vary widely.
- RestingThe original moves the bird straight to the dish. Give it 5 to 8 minutes loosely covered; the juices in a lean bird redistribute quickly and carving immediately loses them to the platter.
- Bread sauceAssumed knowledge and not given here: milk infused with onion and cloves, thickened with fresh white breadcrumbs, finished with butter and a little cream. Make it before the bird goes in and keep it warm, as it stiffens as it cools.
- SourcingWild grouse is seasonal, and where its sale is legal it comes through a game dealer rather than a butcher's counter. Partridge or a poussin substitute reasonably with the same method and will want the longer end of the timing; quail is much smaller and needs considerably less.
- YieldOne grouse per person. The recipe is written in the plural, addressing more than one bird at a time.
Grouse belongs to the short, intense autumn game season, and cookbooks of this period treat it as a prized game bird — roasted hard and fast, served pink, and set on bread sauce rather than gravy, a pairing generally traced to English country-house cookery. The larding is the tell of an older kitchen: before commercial poultry was bred fat, cooks inserted pork fat into lean flesh with a needle, a technique now largely displaced by barding, brining, and basting. The book's confident "if to be very rare" is also worth noting: game was granted a latitude that farmyard birds were not, a distinction that still holds in most game cookery today.