There are few birds more handsome than a cock ring-necked pheasant in his autumn glory. Proudly plumed but spectacularly stupid, they flaunt themselves before the guns. Once dead, however, gutted, plucked and trussed, they are nothing to write home about. I purchased one from that excellent butchery, Sanagan’s Meat Locker in Kensington Market, and took it home to cook.
Pheasants were a wonderful treat when I was a boy. My mother occasionally cooked a brace of them for Sunday lunch, roasting them perfectly, with a light canopy of crispy bacon (not wrapped in bacon because the bird ends up steamed – more of a bacon toupée), serving them with crisp potatoes, bread sauce, a “sand” of fine breadcrumbs finished in the juices in the pan, many vegetables and gravy. We were always warned to watch out for shot – and we often found the tiny shotgun pellets in the meat. The tail feathers were saved so my brother and I could run around my grandmother’s deep garden after lunch with them stuck in our hair, pretending to be First Nations warriors (though that was not the term we used in England in the last century) with our home-made willow bows and arrows.
Faced with the tight, yellowish-pinkish piece of poultry from Sanagan’s, therefore, I called my mum and asked her advice about how best to cook it. It’s so easy to dry out a pheasant in the oven. She heard the hesitation in my voice and suggested that, to be on the safe side, a pot roast might be the answer and gave me precise instructions.
So I browned the whole pheasant briefly in a little olive oil and butter then chopped up some onions, carrots and celery and browned them in the mingled fats, deglazing the casserole with wine and vegetable stock. The bird went back in, with lots of thyme, some salt and pepper. Heavy lid set in place. Into a medium oven for 90 minutes…
Oh the steamy perfection! The flesh was falling from the bones, succulent and perfumed with a hint of gaminess (the best that can be achieved in a country where hanging in the feather is forbidden), the carrots soft as little orange pillows, the onions and celery on the point of liquefaction, the juices rich and sweet. No potatoes, bread sauce or sand – and of course no feathers this time. No running round the garden either. And nothing left in the pot but delicate bones and happy memories.
Irrelevant? Hardly. What could be more pertinent to our very survival than the relentless and irreversible spread of dread Cthulhu’s insidious corruption? Even in his current state of soporous torpor, his psychic tentacles reach forth from his abyssal resting place in ancient R’lyeh to pluck at the fabric of mankind’s tottering sanity with an alien malevolence the likes of which our feeble, primate intellects can scarcely begin to comprehend. I know you have heard it too – a mind-shattering psychic reboation of cosmic dread, a mockingly threnodic ululation heralding the end of reason as we know it, a sirenic paean bidding us to join him in the subgeometric dimensions beyond time and space!
Mr. Chatto SAY IT AINT SO
your words are making me hungrier than a picture could….except I’m curious as to see how the pheasant turned out.
Dear Exploded Daniel, I’m afraid you’ll have to take my word for it. I could not readily find my camera that day and when I lifted off the lid the smell was so enticing… By the time a decent sense of bloggerly responsibility had returned there was nothing to photograph but bones. The key to appearances is to brown the bird first – otherwise it can end up looking unenticingly pallid.
Enough of your HP sauce, Armitage. I have no doubt that you are tormented by dreams of R’lyeh, driven to the edge of sanity so that the portal between waking madness and unconscious terrors lies open like the broken door of a plundered vault. Well, you have brought this upon yourself. I imagine you haggard, haunted, your eyes like crimson fire in bruised and sunken wells – shivering in your garret, gazing at the stub of your last guttering candle, too horrified to dare to sleep. Soon the call of the nameless one will grow so strong that you will have to pay heed. You will slink like a rat onto a ship and make your way halfway around the world to that distant island that appears on no map, is revealed by no instrument of science. You will prostrate yourself before Cthulhu’s unseen gate and then… Perhaps nothing. Hope for nothing! Better that than the alternative. For what if your whimpering obeisance, your craven prayers are actually answered? What if dread Cthulhu rouses himself from eternal slumber? What then the odds on the survival of your soul?
I saw you last week, around midnight, as I left the restaurant, a shadow in the shadows of the trees at Adelaide and Jarvis. You must stop following me, Armitage. I can not help you now.
Hi James, just writing to let you know I have another pheasant hanging for you if you so desire. I am letting you know via your blog because I have misplaced your business card. Schmuck.