Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England

Chapter Seven: Fowl, Wild and Tame

175 chapter seven • Fowl,฀ Wild฀and฀Tame ฀ Fowl is fair in our time. While Americans still eat more beef than chicken, for reasons of both health and convenience the little bird is pecking out a larger market share each year—chicken consumption increased by 70 percent in the last quarter of the twentieth century, at the same time that annual beef consumption fell by twentyfive pounds per capita. Yet the Anglo-American taste for fowl is much older than the current craze. Whereas now chicken and turkey dominate the fowl category to the virtual exclusion of other species (in current American usage, “fowl” means any domestic bird; in Britain, the word refers to the domestic cock or hen), in earlier centuries these were just two among many winged creatures, wild and tame, that ended up on the spit 176 • part 2. recipes and commentaries or in the pot. Nature’s entire aviary was fair game, from birds we may still see on fancy restaurant menus, like pheasant and quail, to those we would find ethically if not gustatorily unpalatable, such as songbirds. Of sixteenth-century bird cookery Colin Spencer writes: “The crane, the bittern, the wild and tame swan, the brant, the lark and two kinds of plover, teal, widgeon, mallard, shelldrake and shoveller, the peewit, scamen knot, olicet, dun bird, partridge and pheasant, were all hunted or snared, eaten and enjoyed.” He also mentions Sir Hugh Plat’s recipe for sparrows, gives the price per dozen for larks (from 1d to 10d), and says that pigeons were frowned upon “by reason of their multitude.” Since the Middle Ages, the nobility, for whom pageantry was as important as flavor in the design of their menus, had found the large number of edible bird species appealing. The success of noble feasts depended on this kind of diversity. It would be painting a distorted picture to deny that roasted flesh meat, including some fancy cuts of pork but most especially beef and mutton, dominated the noble diet. Yet fowl—and game—provided the greatest pleasure and variety. Fowl could be taken fresh at almost any time of year. Before refrigeration , this was especially important in winter and spring, when all wearied of salt meat. To make them more palatable, wildfowl might be spiced and larded, or garnished with forcemeat, lemons, Seville oranges, and sweetbreads, or cooked in broth or cream sauce, or basted with butter and bread crumbs, then baked or roasted. Then as now, the larger birds were considered best for the rack. For display, their feathers and skin were saved and reassembled on the cooked carcass to imitate—or improve upon—the bird in life. In time, tame chickens, geese, ducks, peahens, and—after the Columbian exchange had left its indelible mark on the European diet— turkeys took the place of rarer wildfowl, first on the gentry’s boards and eventually on just about everybody’s table, high and low. But whether wild or domestic, potted or poached, spitted or sauced, fricasseed or fried, fowl have long been considered among the most delectable of foods. “Oh, my dear Sir, what a glorious bit!” exclaimed a guest dining on a wild turkey roasted by the famous French gourmet Anthelme Brillat-Savarin after a hunt near Hartford, Connecticut, in 1794. Cook some of the following neglected classics in ways that approximate the authors’ methods and you might well hear similar expressions of gratitude from your amazed guests. fowl, wild and tame • 177 Wildfowl,฀Ducks,฀Geese Despite their sometimes strong flavor, stringy flesh, and the difficulties of hunting, wildfowl, ducks, and geese long constituted a prestigious if relatively minor part of the Anglo-American diet. As with any nondomesticated animals, birds were “in good grease” (that is, in season) at different times of the year depending upon the species, although many were best taken in autumn and winter, as stated in a mid-sixteenth-century cookbook: “Cygnets be best between All Halloween day and Lent. A mallard is good after a frost, till Candlemas, so is a teal and other wild fowl that swimmeth. A woodcock is best from October to Lent; and so be all other birds as ousels and throstles, robins and such other. Herons, curlews, crane, bittern, bustard, be at all times good; but best in winter. Pheasants, partridge and rail be ever good, but best when they be taken with a hawk. Quail and larks be ever...