Pheasant.—(No. 68.)
Requires a smart fire, but not a fierce one. Thirty minutes will roast a young bird, and forty or fifty a full-grown pheasant. Pick and draw it, cut a slit in the back of the neck, and take out the craw, but don’t cut the head off; wipe the inside of the bird with a clean cloth, twist the legs close to the body, leave the feet on, but cut the toes off; don’t turn the head under the wing, but truss it like a fowl, it is much easier to carve; baste it, butter and froth it, and prepare sauce for it (Nos. 321 and 329). See the instructions in receipts to roast fowls and turkeys, Nos. 57 and 58.
Obs. We believe the rarity of this bird is its best recommendation; and the character given it by an ingenious French author is just as good as it deserves. “Its flesh is naturally tough, and owes all its tenderness and succulence to the long time it is kept before it is cooked;” until it is “bien mortifiée,” it is uneatable142-†. Therefore, instead of “sus per col,” suspend[143] it by one of the long tail-feathers, and the pheasant’s falling from it is the criterion of its ripeness and readiness for the spit.
Our president of the committee of taste (who is indefatigable in his endeavours to improve the health, as well as promote the enjoyment, of his fellow-students in the school of good living, and to whom the epicure, the economist, and the valetudinarian are equally indebted for his careful revision of this work, and especially for introducing that salutary maxim into the kitchen, that “the salubrious is ever a superior consideration to the savoury,” and indeed, the rational epicure only relishes the latter when entirely subordinate to the former), has suggested to us, that the detachment of the feather cannot take place until the body of the bird has advanced more than one degree beyond the state of wholesome haut-goût, and become “trop mortifiée;” and that to enjoy this game in perfection, you must have a brace of birds killed the same day; these are to be put in suspense as above directed, and when one of them drops, the hour is come that the spit should be introduced to his companion:—
“Ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum.”