Common-Sense Papers on Cookery

by A. G. Payne

Now game, whether grouse, partridge, pheasant, or woodcock, requires careful cooking, and, above all things, good gravy.

By good gravy we mean that which will assist, and not counteract or destroy, the flavour of the game. Weak beef-tea or rich turtle soup would be alike wrong; and it will, we fear, be too often found that cooks fail very much in adapting the gravy to the occasion. Roast goose with sage-and-onion stuffing would bear a gravy which, so to speak, would kill the delicate flavour of a partridge.

Game served as a salmi, which nine times out of ten means game cooked before and warmed up, requires quite a differently-flavoured sauce to game proper—i.e., game, not too fresh, and at the same time not at all high, roasted to a turn and served quickly.

In cooking game I fear we cannot learn much from that nation of cooks, the French. I am such an admirer of French cooking as a rule, that I wish to speak with the greatest diffidence, but did you ever taste any game, never mind of what kind, at any foreign hotel or restaurant abroad, to compare with the game we get at home?

I say hotel or restaurant, as I have had no experience of French country private houses.

Whether this is owing to the game itself being of inferior quality or flavour—as is undoubtedly the case with red-legged partridges, when compared with the ordinary English ones—or to other causes, I cannot say, but simply record the fact.

There is no doubt that a large class of men enjoy their food when game is in season more than at any other time.

The class to whom we refer are those who live for the greater part of the year in London, and as a rule never move a mile except in a hansom; to such the 12th of August is the commencement of what may be termed their annual training, the exercise they take during the next three months probably saving them from the inevitable gout and dyspepsia which would necessarily follow a town life such as theirs without such intervals.

What a change! First the early rising—and there are thousands whom nothing but hunting or shooting will persuade to get up early—the substantial breakfast, the glass of bitter, the gun examination, the struggle into the heavy greased shooting-boots, and then the tramp through the heather. What with the exercise and the bracing air of the moors, lunch is approached with feelings which by contrast approximate to what we should imagine the alderman’s would have been, had he carried out the famous doctor’s recipe—viz., to live on a shilling a day, and earn it.

Let us hope the hungry sportsmen may not meet with the disappointment that occurred to a shooting party on the moors, that we referred to before. The first brace of grouse shot were sent to a neighbouring farm to be cooked for lunch. The farmer’s wife, however, had them boiled, and stuffed with sage and onions.