How to Cook Birds Without an Oven

You braise them. This originally meant cooking in the braise, that is in glowing embers; a neolithic and gypsy practice embracing the roasting of small birds, hedgehogs, rabbit, squirrels, enclosed in a coating of damp clay, slapped directly on the feathers, prickles, fur, which later conveniently ‘came away’ with the clay, hardened in the fire, when fractured on removal.