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COOKERY

THE Woodcock has as warm a welcome on the table as in the coverts, which is saying a great deal, nor is the snipe much less appreciated. But the woodcock is the more valued for his comparative rarity. You may be satiated with partridges or pheasants-even with grouse in August and September-but the woodcocks come in capricious flights, and, when there is open weather in the far north, may provokingly defer their arrival. They are essentially birds of passage, and though many breed in the West of Ireland, in the combes of our southern counties, and in the great pine-woods of the Scottish Highlands, they cannot now be said to have naturalised themselves with us. It must have been very different in the olden time, when England was forest land from Tyne to Trent, when the Eastern shires were overgrown with reed and sedge, and when Somerset was still as swampy as when Alfred sought a refuge there. Then the birds had all they could desire, food and freedom from

disturbance. We may judge how they abounded under the Plantagenets, when we read that, at the installation banquet of the Kingmaker's brother as Archbishop of York, four hundred woodcocks figured at the feast. They must all have been snared or netted in the neighbourhood-we should like to know how many fell victims to the springes—and it is melancholy to think of the barbarous cookery, when they were roasted and shrivelled by the bushel. That banquet, by the way, gives an interesting idea of English ornithology in 1647, and of the omnivorous tastes of our ancestors. There were swans, herons, and cranes, plovers, goodwits, redshanks, knotts, ruffs and reeves, curlews, rails and egrets, quails and bitterns, larks and sparrows, with sundry other small 'fowles' it is difficult to identify. And the birds were sent up promiscuously with the fishes, with occasional interludes of entremets or a solid pièce de

résistance.

Woodcocks vary considerably in size; they range from ten to sixteen ounces or even more; but, thanks to their roving habits, you can always rely more or less on the flavour. A Bohemian pheasant, or one reared on the Welsh hills or among the rowan trees of a Highland glen, is different as possible from his lowland relative who has been hand-fed on buckwheat in

home coverts, and you can tell at the first mouthful whether the grouse bought promiscuously at the poulterer's has been impregnating himself with bitter on the heather shoots or raiding the corn sheaves in the Yorkshire Ridings. But when you go marketing for woodcock you are fairly safe. All wandering wild birds are fastidious as to their fare; they diligently search for the delicacies that tempt their palates, and in England we foolishly neglect some of the best of them. In that respect we might learn many a lesson from the Italians. Wheat-ears and larks we have learned to like; but the robin, with the faint soupçon of the bitter of the grouse, is scarcely inferior to the ortolan. We admit that it seems inhuman to sacrifice that confiding friend who is always at hand to pick up the crumbs at luncheons in the coverts, but we need have no such scruples with the fieldfares or with the red-wings, who, although the most piquant of the succulent thrushes, are seldom seen on an English table. With the woodcocks and most of the larks caught in the autumn they are merely casual visitors, stopping here for their own convenience, and we need have small scruple in taking toll of them. But most of these migrants are flighty and restless ; the woodcock is the exception: he hates exercise after heavy meals, and, as he is for ever stuffing, when

undisturbed by obnoxious guns, he always keeps in prime condition.

Dear as he is to all devotees of the table, nowhere perhaps is he more keenly appreciated than by the forlorn watchers in lonely lighthouses? When a flight is on, and the weather is hazy, the birds are dashing themselves against the glass in Heligoland, and falling stunned or paralysed in the gallery. There, however, the keepers are on the land, and regularly supplied with provisions; but on Skerryvore and other beacons on the rocks in the Outer Hebrides the flights have sometimes relieved those outposts of civilisation when rations had been reduced and they were on the verge of starvation.

It is strange how little we find about the cooking of the woodcock in English literature, ancient or modern, in books on sport or natural history, on cookery or in fiction. Old Gervase Markham, who in 1614 dedicated his 'Cheape and Good husbandry for the vvell-ordering of All Beasts and Fowles' to the accomplished Lord Dorset, had sound culinary notions and has much to say of the kitchen. He gives us to understand that the practice of artificial cramming was then carried to extraordinary lengths. He has directions for the fattening of caged godwits, knots, grey plover, and curlews, but there is not a word of

the woodcock. Perhaps it is just as well, for the system he counsels is essentially vicious. Fancy preparing a woodcock for the table, or a plover or a curlew, for the matter of that, on a diet of 'fresh wheate-meale, mixed with milk'! Shakspeare draws a metaphor from the woodcock in Hamlet, and I believe Ben Jonson makes casual allusion to the bird, but he is ignored by our sylvan poets and our novelists. The reason for that may be that few of them were sportsmen. And though Gilbert White and other naturalists have many remarks as to his habits and some of them are extremely speculative -they never rank him as a delicacy with the larks and the wheat-ears.

As to the cookery books, there is doubtless another explanation. The French and other foreigners were our masters in all the refinements of the art, and English cookery, almost to the beginning of the last century, was primitive in the extreme. Such lights of science as there were, were burning or flickering in the metropolis, and London was far removed from the favourite haunts of the 'cocks. Consignments were rare, the arrivals were few, and the birds had deteriorated with interminable delays. When Pepys, in his coach, lost his way between Portsmouth and London, what chance was there for the trail of a 'cock

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