Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches

birds in the same manner as a pigeon pie. TO ROAST SNIPES, WOODCOCKS, OR PLOVERS. Pick them immediately; but it is the fashion to cook these birds without drawing. Cut some slices of bread, allowing a slice to each bird, and (having pared off the crust) toast them nicely, and lay them in the bottom of the dripping-pan to catch the trail, as it is called. Dredge the birds with flour, and put them on a small spit before a clear brisk fire. Baste them with lard, or fresh butter. They will be done in twenty or thirty minutes. Serve them up laid on the toast, and garnished with sliced orange, or with orange jelly. Have brown gravy in a boat. TO ROAST REED-BIRDS, OR ORTOLANS. Put into every bird, an oyster, or a little butter mixed with some finely sifted bread-crumbs. Dredge them with flour. Run a small skewer through them, and tie them on the spit. Baste them with lard or with fresh butter. They will be done in about ten minutes. A very nice way of cooking these birds is, (having greased them all over with lard or with fresh butter, and wrapped them in vine leaves secured closely with a string,) to lay them in a heated iron pan, and bury them in ashes hot enough to roast or bake them. Remove the vine leaves before you send the birds to table. Reed birds are very fine made into little dumplings with a thin crust of flour and butter, and boiled about twenty minutes. Each must be tied in a separate cloth. LARDING. To lard meat or poultry is to introduce into the surface of the flesh, slips of the fat only of bacon, by means of a larding-pin or larding-needle, it being called by both names. It is a steel instrument about a foot long, sharp at one end, and cleft at the other into four divisions, which are near two inches in length, and resemble tweezers. It can be obtained at the hardware stores. Cut the bacon into slips about two inches in length,