I had always assumed that the eating of swan was like roasting a goose, as you just potted the thing and then potted it at 350 degrees until it was done.
You know like that swan that was ate which belonged to Queen Liz in England. The English ate lots of swans as they were good eating, too good as they almost all got ate up.
Thing is, in America you can blast the non endangered species of swans and eat them. Pa Ingalls shot some stinky white bird and they ate it after baking on Little House, but this English recipe for swan makes it sound like the things are tough as leather for all the beating that you have to do on them.
Granted swans are still alive I think that got off the boat with Noah, as they live a fair piece, but if one got a young signet, I would think the remedy would to just bake it to serve instead of all this hocus pocus going on in the recipe.
To pot a Swan:—Bone and skin your swan, and beat the flesh in a mortar, taking out the strings as you beat it; then take some clear fat bacon, and beat with the swan, and when 'tis of a light flesh colour, there is bacon enough in it; and when 'tis beaten till 'tis like dough, 'tis enough; then season it with pepper, salt, cloves, mace, and nutmeg, all beaten fine; mix it well with your flesh, and give it a beat or two all together; then put it in an earthen pot, with a little claret and fair water, and at the top two pounds of fresh butter spread over it; cover it with coarse paste, and bake it with bread; then turn it out into a dish, and squeeze it gently to et out the moisture; then put it in a pot fit for it; and when 'tis cold, cover it over with clarified butter, and next day paper it up. In this manner you may do goose, duck, or beef, or hare's flesh.
So you have to bone the thing which is work, and then beat it to remove all the stringy meat, which means an old bird, you pound in a pile of bacon to make a sort of bacon swan dough.....and you beat it up again a time or two with the spices.
Then you pile it in and put in more grease for butter and the cover it with something called coarse paste, which must be a sealer with bread, so this is like swan loaf......then you bake it up, and squeeze out the moisture which I would think is the grease as no water could survive all that pounding.
After that you put on more butter and then paper it up for storage, which must be something like chewing on bacon grease topped with a stick of butter.
I imagine this has like 10,000 calories per slice and would keep you going almost 40 days at one sitting. As the Europeans put the nutmeg into everything to hide the taste of rotten and rancid meat, I suspect this would taste the same fresh out of the pot or the next year when the worms got into it.
I do like olde recipes though as what else could you do with a swan that was so tough you would break your teeth chewing on it eh? I would put them into a hissy pot pressure cooker, but then that is modern stuff and I tend not to like butter topped bacon for meal.
My stomach tells me this is one of the worst recipes I could try, so it is why I featured it here.
agtG
