game-and-offal

Pig liver pieces with spicesry, spit roasted in caul.

Partridge with beef steak pieces, mushrooms and herbs in a suet pastry case, steamed (White 1932, etc)

Badger is almost unknown as a meat in England, but badger ham has occasionally been a local delicacy.

Form of tripe formerly produced in the town of Bath, the receipt now lost.

Pork ribs coated in brown sugar and strong seasonings, baked.

Boiled brains, pureed with herbs, formed, with egg or flour if needed, into patties and fried (Rundell 1807, Acton 1845, etc)

Brains are boiled, skinned and then sliced or chopped. Usually served with hot butter.

Calves brains, soaked in water, boiled, wrapped in slice of bacon, baked in a dish with flour, water and sherry to make a sauce.

Oxtail is usually stewed slowly with onions, until the meat falls from the fiddly bones. It is allowed to cool and the fat skimmed off before re-heating to serv...

Meat products, most commonly whole pig's head, boiled with spices until fallen and set as a slab in their own jelly, eaten cold.

Small partridge, dressed, grilled rubbed with butter, salt and cayenne (Acton 1845)

The jelly and minced meat from a boiled calf's head set in a mould with spices (Acton 1845)

A set jelly made by boiling calf's feet in water or milk. The liquid is strained, then mixed with sugar and spices for a cold dessert or with pepper to make wha...

A much prized dish from earliest times to the beginning of the 20th Century, almost always served whole, boiled and trimmed, as a centrepiece to be carved at ta...

Strips of meat from a boiled calf's head, breaded and spiced, fried (Acton 1845)

Shredded boiled calves-foot meat with crumb, suet, dried fruit, sugar, eggs and cream. Boiled in a buttered cloth (Moxon 1764).

Minced tripe with marrow, sweet spices and citrus juice between sheets of puff paste (WM 1658)

Brawn of rabbit meat and trotters, boiled until fallen, with spices.

(Also: chidling, chitling, chitter, chitteril)

Rice boiled with milk, raisins, sugar and sweet spices, beaten egg and chunks of bone marrow, baked.

Bleached honeycomb (reticulum) tripe in pieces, soused in salt, vinegar and pepper.

Rabbit or hare filled with a rich stuffing of bread, fruit, herbs and spices. Known from several early sources, the version given here from Robert May 1660 is b...

Sliced and fried, liver, bacon and onions in beef stock under sliced potato. Baked

Cowheel is the fatty cartilage from around a beast's heel. Chunks are boiled, and form a sweet, mucilaginous gravy.

Chunks of stewed cowheel served with a parsley sauce poured over.

Stewed sweetbreads in cream or thickened milk, often with onion.

Old name for pork crackling - crisply cooked pork rind.

Beatrix Potter wrote to her publisher enthusing about the forthcoming crow-shooting season and looking forward to crow pies. She also started, but never complet...

Plain roasted saddle of venison served with beans and Cumberland sauce

Bones with a little meat on, coated in a hot spice 'devil' sauce and grilled (Soyer 1845, Francatelli 1846, etc)

Cut kidneys, usually lamb's, with hot spices such as Cayenne pepper and mustard. Frequently served on toast. Known in the 19th Century as a breakfast dish but m...

Rabbit pieces coated in stuffing mixture and baked.

A Ox tripe wrapped around stuffing of breadcrumbs, egg, minced onion, parsley and lemon, the edges sewn up and the whole baked covered with fatty bacon.

"Take a chepis wombe" (take a sheep's womb) ... and stuff it with chopped chicken, pork, cheese with eggs spices, boiled (Austin 1440)

Pigeon joints with rump-steak and ham under a puff crust (Mrs.B, whose stepfather was clerk to Epsom Racecourse)

Large meatballs of breadcrumbs or rusk with herbs and minced meat and offal (most traditionally pork heart and liver), baked close together so that, on rising, ...

"A dish in ancient cookery, composed of eggs, pigeons and onions."

Cooked trotters, floured and fried in hog's lard. Served with gravy of claret, mushrooms and burned butter. Lemon, breadcrumb and berry garnish (Bradley 1728)

Pieces of boiled chaldron (tripe), with spices, onion, fried with mutton gravy, citrus juice, egg yolk and nutmeg (WM 1658).

Cowheel pieces fried, usually in butter with onions.

Ox-feet (Cow-Heel pieces) rolled in egg and seasoned crumb. Fried in butter (Mrs.B)

Fried ox-tripe pieces. (Proper Booke 1550, Mollard 1802, Walsh 1859, etc)

Frog's legs boiled in veal broth with herbs, lemon and shallots. Served in cream with mushrooms, or in gravy with claret. "They make a very good Dish ... but we...

Frogs have very rarely played any part in English cooking. With one or two historical exceptions...

Stew of rabbit pieces, usually unboned, with celery and herbs.

Original Receipt in 'The Whole Duty of a Woman: or a Guide to the Female Sex' by Lady Mary Cressy (Cressy 1696)

Split kidneys, grilled or fried. Often soused with pepper.

Hare meat on a bed of bread or on the Old English Lozenge Pasta This is found in the 'The Forme of Cury' by the Chief Master-Cook of King Richard II - Foods of ...

Old hare strewn with pepper, cloves and oatmeal, fried, then baked with butter and a beer baste (Hartley 1954)

Pig's pluck, liver, sweetbreads etc, chopped with sage, onions, seasonings, wrapped together and roasted (Cury 1390, Eaton 1822, etc).

Meat loaf made of spiced pork, pork offal and breadcrumbs. Baked and served cold. Most traditionally wrapped in caul.

There is well-attested record of hedgehog (or 'hotchewitchi' or 'otchie'; see 'horse') being a Romany favourite. The beast is packed in clay to be baked on an o...

Minced game and bacon made into balls with chutney, cayenne, minced olives, game gravy, breadcrumbs and egg. Rolled in crumb and fried (J.Salmon)

Rabbit with a spiced and sweetened parsley bread sauce.

Roast heron or crane appears in many early cookbooks, almost always with the bird's head to be pushed under the wing for cooking.

Meat pudding containing heron pieces, with distinct instructions regarding the bones.

(Sheep's Head)

Jugged simply means 'enclosed', as in 'jug' for 'prison'. Jugged hare is any hare cooked in a closed vessel, rather than roasted open to the fire. The earliest ...

Whole dressed pigeons baked in a pot with chopped onion and whole plums.

The Kentish Plover, or Grey Plover (Charadrius alexandrinus), is a small wading bird. They were once highly prized as food, though Mrs.B thought them fit for no...

Faggots of rusk with minced lamb and lamb fat.

There is some evidence that lamb's ears cooked with sorrel was a known Romany dish.

Lamb's fries are generally taken to be testicles, soaked, peeled and fried with onions, however there is some evidence that the term has been used for chopped l...

Floured liver slices with breadcrumbs, bacon, parsley and sometimes mushrooms, stewed (White 1932)

Langdebouf (French: Tongue of Beef) was the precursor of pickled tongue, the meat being boiled with fruit and spices before being pickled in vinegar and salt (N...

Hare roasted while basted with milk and butter. Known from 'Food in England' by Dorothy Hartley (Hartley 1954).

Sliced liver fried with spinach, parsley, and green onions

Minced liver (or other meat) with egg, spices, flour. Fried (Wooley 1672)

A heart (calves, lambs) stuffed and boiled.

Marrow melted out of bones and beaten to a cream as it sets.

Beef bones sawn to size and either roasted or, according to Mrs.B, their ends sealed with paste and boiled, the paste removed before serving whole and upright f...

Breadcrumbs with bone marrow, egg, fruit and spices, baked (Family Guide 1747, Moxon 1764, Mollard 1802, etc)

Cream, yolks, sugar, spices, wine with biscuits, bone marrow and peel, "stir it on the fire till it becomes thick" then, and when it is cold put it into a dish ...

Cooked (roasted or boiled) bone marrow, spread on toast. Commonly highly spiced. Served hot. Digby 1669 soaks the marrow-bones in sweet wine.

Bone marrow parboiled, drained, seasoned with chopped parsley, pepper, salt, lemon-juice, and "a mere suspicion of shalot", spread on squares of hot crisp dry t...

Pie with veal, bacon and larks. Not the same dish as Melton Mowbray Pork Pie

Sweetbread are the thymus or pancreas a young beast, see Sweetbreads. Why it was once considered necessary to make imitation ones is not clear, but receipts occ...

In this version, beef slices layered with suet, wine vinegar and spices, in a pasty.

Pie with filling of chopped calf or pig intestines and tripes, usually with onion and sometimes with cream and root vegetables (Hartley 1954). The name is well-...

Rabbit (or rabbit and pork) portions in a cream and mustard sauce.

Chopped game meat fried with onions, covered with mashed potato and baked. Known only from local reports in the Derbyshire Peak District.

Beef tongues, dried and smoked to preserve them. In common usage from about 1550 to 1790. WM 1658 has them salted with ordinary salt and saltpetre (E252), dried...

Venison minced with onions, bacon, breadcrumbs and seasoning, rolled in a cloth and steamed. Known only since J.Salmon.

Partridge pieces coated on oatmeal, cooked on a bed of diced ham with vegetables and wine.

Sliced liver, onion, bacon and potato mixed together and fried, then stewed in gravy.

Blood puddings (Black Puddings) with a high proportion of oatmeal and flavouring herbs.

Usually boiled and sliced (Soyer 1845)

Ox-lips, boiled. Moxon 1764 serves them with truffles, mushrooms, coxcombs and forcemeat balls.

Tongues can be simply boiled and sliced, but this is now rare. They are more commonly salted, boiled, skinned and pressed with beef jelly into a cylindrical sla...

Tripe is the stomach lining of an ox, cow or other ruminant that has been separated and prepared for cooking. The rumen gives blanket or thick seam tripe, the r...

A form of jellied brawn made from chopped mixed pork parts with sausage, spiced and 'collared' (pressed). Served with Oxford Brawn Sauce.

Fried kidneys on fried bread sippets, rich sauce over.

Pie made of a thin forcemeat-and-breadcrumb crust and containing small birds (pigeons, larks etc.) or other small game such as rabbits, in a rich sauce, possibl...

Paste containing Savoy leaves with whole stuffed partridge, boiled (Soyer 1845)

As partridge has little meat, usually bulked with veal or ham. Eaton 1822 lays the bird pieces on a veal steak.

Minced partridge with beef marrow, orange and lime peels, and sweet spices in puff pastry (WM 1658).

Roast Peacock appears from the 15th to the 19th Centuries and is still occasionally prepared today, most distinctively in a manner where the whole skin with fea...

Pheasant joints stewed with root vegetables.

Mollard 1802 has them boiled with herbs then breadcrumbed. Hartley 1954 explains how they were once stewed with wine or vinegar and served with mustard, lemon o...

Pigeon joints stewed with parsnip pieces. (J.Salmon)

Usually pigeon joints with sliced beef under a single crust, often with mushrooms and bacon (Acton 1845, Hartley 1954, etc)

Now usually pigeon pieces, fried before being stewed with stock and vegetables, often with bacon.

Stuffed pigeon with other meats and hard-boiled egg in a suet pastry case (Soyer 1845)

The Plover family, which includes lapwings, are too tiny to cook in any conventional poultry manner. Mrs.B recommended roasting them plucked, but undrawn, and s...

A game and vegetable pie. Typically rabbit, carrot and potato under a single crust.

Wild quail are now completely protected, but domesticated birds are available all year.

Rabbit pieces stewed with apple pieces and vegetables.

Rabbit pieces with root vegetables, stewed in cider.

Rabbit meat with spices and pig meat set in a mould with pig's trotter jelly, or, more recently, prepared gelatine. The association with Cheshire appears to be ...

Rabbit portions cooked in a milk sauce, commonly with onions, celery and bay and sometimes with bacon.

Cooked rabbit pieces with onions and herbs, in a suet crust (Soyer 1845, Francatelli 1852)

Now, typically, whole rabbit joints, with carrots and onions.

Known from Wooley 1672

Rabbit stewed with bacon and thyme. Said in J.Salmon to be a specialty of Somerset.

Cygnets (young swans) used to be served at official banquets as far back as the 14th century, and were a feature of the annual dinner at Vintners' Hall in the C...

The famous receipt for roast hare in Glasse 1747 has the hare stuffed with breadcrumb and sweet herbs and trussed so as the head is held up, to imitate life.

Image: Gainsborough Old Hall

Rooks were formerly commonplace fare for farm labourers, and the rookeries especially protected for that reason. There is no definitive receipt. Young rooks are...

Faggots of minced pork, pork offal, fat, breadcrumbs and herbs, formed into small balls, sometimes each wrapped in caul, and baked close together so that, on ri...

Scrap' is the small pieces of meat left after the fat of a pig has been melted down to lard and 'Scrap cakes' are known from several sources. Mrs.B mixes her sc...

Sheep's ears stuffed with veal forcemeat with breadcrumb and herbs, laid one over the other and fried. "This is a pretty side dish." (Eaton 1822).

A whole cooked sheep's head. Known by the name 'Jemmy' from 19th Century literature, including Dickens' 'Sketches by Boz' and Mayhew's 'London Labour and the Lo...

Split, cleaned head, boiled with chunks of winter vegetables and, usually, barley or rice (Francatelli 1852)

Veal par-cooked by poaching in herb (sage, marjoram) stock, finished by roasting until brown. Served with white sauce made from the stock.

Faggots well flavoured with sage and paersley, baked.

Local name for pork crackling.

"Industrious and intelligent boys who live in the country, are mostly well up in the cunning art of catching small birds ... pluck them free from feathers, cut ...

Small waterfowl are rarely eaten nowadays. If they are, they are commonly plucked, drawn and baked or fried whole, or slit and the breasts only removed for fryi...

Tripe pieces fried in batter.

Sparrows in batter, boiled (Raffald 1769). See also: Fonnell

Squirrel has rarely served as a food, though it did achieve some fame in the 1990's when systematic efforts to eradicate the grey squirrel from English woodland...

Beef chunks stewed with approximate equal quantity of cowheel chunks in gravy, usually with onions.

Kidneys simmered in buttered stock with onion.

Ox heart, filled with stuffing and roasted. Served sliced.

Tongue rubbed daily for five weeks with saltpetre (E252) and coarse sugar (Acton 1845)

Minced veal kidney with spices, salt, currants, sugar and lemon, baked or fried in puff paste (Moxon 1764)

Sweetbread are either the thymus (called gullet sweetbread) or the pancreas (belly sweetbread) of a young pig, lamb or calf.

Sliced kidney and sausages cooked with onions, and possibly other vegetables, in sherry and beer.

Meat and jelly from a pigs head, ears and feet with cayenne and cloves, herbs and pot vegetables (Acton 1845)

Small pieces of bleached thick seam tripe stewed in milk with coarsely-cut onions and a herb, typically bay, but occasionally sage or parsley. Now usually serve...

Tripe boiled in mutton broth with spinach and lettuce, served on bread sops. Although the receipt here is very ancient (Huswife 1594) tripe alongside spinach ge...

Trotters are the feet, usually of pigs, but occasionally of sheep. They are plain boiled and often served hot with spiced vinegar.

Udder is salted and boiled to be sliced as a cold meat, or roasted.

Umbles are the meaty parts of a beast's pluck - the heart, liver, kidneys and lungs - usually of a deer, but also of other animals.

Cubed venison stewed with whole, cooked, peeled sweet chestnuts, root vegetables, onion, bay and juniper.

Often bulked-up with lamb (Mrs.B) or other game.

Skinned, chopped snakes, boiled with herbs. Known from several 18th Century sources. Snake also occurs in a Wedding Cake receipt from 1660.

Rabbit joints coated in herbs and breadcrumb, sprinkled with cayenne and roasted.

A beast's windpipe/trachea or gullet/oesophagus, brined and cooked.

Ox Tripe and Shrimps in a spiced white sauce.

Wild boar is roasted, or treated as for other pork.