Red Grouse

Tomorrow is the Glorious Twelfth. There is the usual flurry of excitement as some attempt to fly in the ‘first grouse’, shot in the early morning, to appear that night on the restaurant menu. But when a London restaurant offers Winston Churchill roast grouse on 12 August, he chooses a steak and kidney pie instead. Two, if not three, days later the grouse might be worth eating, he opines, but not on the day it was shot.

‘Grouse, and its kindred, require longer keeping than any other of the game birds,’ says HBC Pollard in The Sportsman’s Cookery Book (1926), ‘and should hang from a minimum of three days to over a fortnight, according to the weather and the larder.’