To Eat a Grouse
June 2, 2022 10:02 AM Subscribe
Most of the grouse shot in England has historically gone to clubs like White's and the other St James's clubs. Their names are Wodehousian – Boodle's, Brooks's, Buck's Club, the Carlton Club, the East India Club, Pratt's, the Reform Club (where the fictitious Phileas Fogg started his journey around the world in 80 days) and the Turf Club, to name a few - each of them with an associated interest (the Turf's, for example, is horseracing) and an infantile rivalry that mimics the inter-house competitions of their former private schools. The one thing all of them have typically had in common is that women were not allowed, unless to clean or cook, a quality they share with the most famous public (i.e. private) school for boys in the country: Eton College.
By Justin Gayner (OE).
By Justin Gayner (OE).
On 27 October 1986, the BUM exploded.
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:25 PM on June 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:25 PM on June 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
To me grouse are the birds that invariably scare the shit out of me when I'm mushroom hunting. They wait till you're right on top of them to fly off while making a ton of noise.
posted by Ferreous at 1:37 PM on June 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Ferreous at 1:37 PM on June 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
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Doesn't everyone know that pheasant should be hung to age (= rot) until the legs fall off? That's the correct way to prepare it. It tastes fucking vile (imagine rotten chicken soused with Pine-Sol: gamebird diet can be heavy on the terpenes) but that's the way that the toffs like it.
Vastly amused that there was no mention of Scotland, which in places is nothing more than one giant grouse moor.
Oh yeah, what Bloxworth Snout said, too
posted by scruss at 2:22 PM on June 2, 2022 [5 favorites]
On 27 October 1986, the BUM exploded.
Doesn't everyone know that pheasant should be hung to age (= rot) until the legs fall off? That's the correct way to prepare it. It tastes fucking vile (imagine rotten chicken soused with Pine-Sol: gamebird diet can be heavy on the terpenes) but that's the way that the toffs like it.
Vastly amused that there was no mention of Scotland, which in places is nothing more than one giant grouse moor.
Oh yeah, what Bloxworth Snout said, too
posted by scruss at 2:22 PM on June 2, 2022 [5 favorites]
That photo of Boris Johnson is the most perfect illustration of privilege I've ever seen: the personality of an obnoxious and monstrously spoiled child, trapped in the body of a middle-aged man wearing hunting tweeds.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 2:44 PM on June 2, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by Gerald Bostock at 2:44 PM on June 2, 2022 [6 favorites]
I think this is either the smallest subculture (by population) or the largest subculture (by area) covered by Vittles in a while, but there is a lot of pure gold in the archive. If I had the time to sort through the archive right now, it could make an amazing post, but I think I'll stick to this as an epitome of it: 60 South Asian Dishes Every Londoner Should Know.
But why not subscribe to the substack mailing list? I'm on the free plan, and it's great to have a Monday elevenses read about food while I'm easing into the week.
posted by ambrosen at 2:56 PM on June 2, 2022 [6 favorites]
But why not subscribe to the substack mailing list? I'm on the free plan, and it's great to have a Monday elevenses read about food while I'm easing into the week.
posted by ambrosen at 2:56 PM on June 2, 2022 [6 favorites]
Re Grouse-hunting
"I know why the sun shall never set on the British Empire..... because God doesn't trust the British in the Dark"
posted by lalochezia at 4:17 PM on June 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
"I know why the sun shall never set on the British Empire..... because God doesn't trust the British in the Dark"
posted by lalochezia at 4:17 PM on June 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
One of my favorite satires of England and the English ruling classes is one most English people don't notice until it's pointed out to them, as it was to me by an amused Irishman long ago.
It's The Affront from the Iain M. Banks novel Excession.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 5:12 PM on June 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
It's The Affront from the Iain M. Banks novel Excession.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 5:12 PM on June 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
This was fascinating. I read about those clubs a lot in historical romance novels, but its hard to fathom them as going concerns in this day and age.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:22 PM on June 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by jacquilynne at 6:22 PM on June 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Famously, the clubs on St. James don't have signs outside.
Because, of course, if you don't already know where they are, you don't belong inside.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 12:50 AM on June 3, 2022
Because, of course, if you don't already know where they are, you don't belong inside.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 12:50 AM on June 3, 2022
but its hard to fathom them as going concerns in this day and age
New ones have opened quite recently. Some have shut it merged over the years. Some have allowed women, starting from the 1980s, but many still don't. Tatler can keep you informed on which are most glamorous.
posted by biffa at 12:57 AM on June 3, 2022
New ones have opened quite recently. Some have shut it merged over the years. Some have allowed women, starting from the 1980s, but many still don't. Tatler can keep you informed on which are most glamorous.
posted by biffa at 12:57 AM on June 3, 2022
An awful lot of shot grouse just get dumped in piles of rotting corpses on private land out of view of the public. I'd be willing to bet that's where most of them end up. This is not about eating grouse, it's about power and cruelty. No way are 700,000 being eaten in a few small private clubs.
The gamekeepers will poison, trap and shoot any other wildlife that threatens the business, especially birds of prey. But they'll shoot anything, even rare mountain hares. They'll often do this with cruel, illegal traps. Gamekeepers regularly get convicted of breaking animal protection laws but punishments are usually very mild and they go back to killing and torturing wildlife.
The ideal land for shooting grouse isn't natural: landowners will burn the moors. They'll set fire to protected wildlife areas. The smoke flows down into nearby towns and creates a health problem for people nearby. The fires often get out of control and destroy much wider areas of land, causing huge damage to wild areas and requiring a lot of work from the emergency services.
The "management" of grouse moors causes another problem: the moor no longer holds water properly as it would naturally: water will flow off the hills into nearby rivers and cause flooding damage to nearby towns.
Both the burning and the flooding cause ancient peat to break up and release carbon dioxide.
Don't like all this? The gamekeepers and other staff will act as violent thugs and assault protestors, and they'll usually get away with little or no punishment. In fact they're happy to intimidate people who are simply walking in the area.
None of this is an accidental side-effect of the "sport" - it's all part of the cruelty that these people enjoy. Britain has violent rural gangs (of rich people) who enjoy swaggering around and intimidating the public. It's little different to the Etonians burning £50 notes in front of homeless people.
posted by BinaryApe at 1:29 AM on June 3, 2022 [16 favorites]
The gamekeepers will poison, trap and shoot any other wildlife that threatens the business, especially birds of prey. But they'll shoot anything, even rare mountain hares. They'll often do this with cruel, illegal traps. Gamekeepers regularly get convicted of breaking animal protection laws but punishments are usually very mild and they go back to killing and torturing wildlife.
The ideal land for shooting grouse isn't natural: landowners will burn the moors. They'll set fire to protected wildlife areas. The smoke flows down into nearby towns and creates a health problem for people nearby. The fires often get out of control and destroy much wider areas of land, causing huge damage to wild areas and requiring a lot of work from the emergency services.
The "management" of grouse moors causes another problem: the moor no longer holds water properly as it would naturally: water will flow off the hills into nearby rivers and cause flooding damage to nearby towns.
Both the burning and the flooding cause ancient peat to break up and release carbon dioxide.
Don't like all this? The gamekeepers and other staff will act as violent thugs and assault protestors, and they'll usually get away with little or no punishment. In fact they're happy to intimidate people who are simply walking in the area.
None of this is an accidental side-effect of the "sport" - it's all part of the cruelty that these people enjoy. Britain has violent rural gangs (of rich people) who enjoy swaggering around and intimidating the public. It's little different to the Etonians burning £50 notes in front of homeless people.
posted by BinaryApe at 1:29 AM on June 3, 2022 [16 favorites]
scruss: pheasant should be hung to age (= rot) until the legs fall off
Given how the corpse is hung, it's rather: pheasant should be hung to age (= rot) until it falls off its legs. That's how my Great Uncle H liked it, after he married the only daughter of an Australian sheep magnate in 1903 and could therefore afford a couple of Purdeys with which to blaze away at the wildlife. Discussing this as a child led me to appreciate that reg'lar proletariat beef is also hung for about ten days after slaughter for the enzymes to do their work on the tissue. And that leads me to think that the insult to biodiversity and the planet wrought by shooting grouse is not qualitatively different from hamburger and chops.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:38 AM on June 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
Given how the corpse is hung, it's rather: pheasant should be hung to age (= rot) until it falls off its legs. That's how my Great Uncle H liked it, after he married the only daughter of an Australian sheep magnate in 1903 and could therefore afford a couple of Purdeys with which to blaze away at the wildlife. Discussing this as a child led me to appreciate that reg'lar proletariat beef is also hung for about ten days after slaughter for the enzymes to do their work on the tissue. And that leads me to think that the insult to biodiversity and the planet wrought by shooting grouse is not qualitatively different from hamburger and chops.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:38 AM on June 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
without the BUM funding grouse moors (and the gentlemen’s clubs that buy the grouse to sell in their dining rooms), the future of the sport is under threat
Good. Vast swathes of the hills where I live on the edge of the Peak District are grouse moors. I find them bleakly beautiful, these huge expanses of heather and bilberry and peat bog on gritstone. I grew up exploring this environment, where permitted, and it is like nowhere else I've ever been. But the grouse moor isn't the natural unspoiled wilderness that many think it is.
As Binary Ape notes, the men who own and control these hills maintain them as an artificial environment for the sole purpose of farming these astonishingly stupid game birds. This is at the cost of most other wildlife, including many protected species, which they kill with impunity, rarely facing any consequence.
I remember a few years ago being surprised to see a Red Kite on a moor not far from me - these are birds that have famously staged an astonishing recovery along our motorway corridors in recent years, but have not been able to survive on hills that would appear to be an ideal environment for them. I suspect that Kite did not reside on that grouse moor for long, doubtless the victim of a gamekeeper who views killing anything that might compete with his lordship's sport in even the most marginal way as just part of the job.
Since the CROW act of the early 2000 was brought in by the Labour government of the time, we can at least now wander over these moors on foot for much of the year, but the owners still get exceptional permission to close most of their land off, sometimes for weeks, when they want to slaughter the birds with their horrible chums. Regular farmers rightly have to jump through many hoops to ask for any changes to rights of way, but the grouse moor owners seem to encounter no problems whatsoever.
Happily some former grouse moors round here are now retired, having been sold off to organisations like the National Trust who don't permit shoots on their land. I note that TFA mentions that the most expensive shoots can cost £15k a day, this is a lower figure than the £20k that I heard as the going rate a decade or so ago, so perhaps demand for this ridiculous pastime is indeed declining.
posted by tomsk at 5:04 AM on June 3, 2022 [6 favorites]
Good. Vast swathes of the hills where I live on the edge of the Peak District are grouse moors. I find them bleakly beautiful, these huge expanses of heather and bilberry and peat bog on gritstone. I grew up exploring this environment, where permitted, and it is like nowhere else I've ever been. But the grouse moor isn't the natural unspoiled wilderness that many think it is.
As Binary Ape notes, the men who own and control these hills maintain them as an artificial environment for the sole purpose of farming these astonishingly stupid game birds. This is at the cost of most other wildlife, including many protected species, which they kill with impunity, rarely facing any consequence.
I remember a few years ago being surprised to see a Red Kite on a moor not far from me - these are birds that have famously staged an astonishing recovery along our motorway corridors in recent years, but have not been able to survive on hills that would appear to be an ideal environment for them. I suspect that Kite did not reside on that grouse moor for long, doubtless the victim of a gamekeeper who views killing anything that might compete with his lordship's sport in even the most marginal way as just part of the job.
Since the CROW act of the early 2000 was brought in by the Labour government of the time, we can at least now wander over these moors on foot for much of the year, but the owners still get exceptional permission to close most of their land off, sometimes for weeks, when they want to slaughter the birds with their horrible chums. Regular farmers rightly have to jump through many hoops to ask for any changes to rights of way, but the grouse moor owners seem to encounter no problems whatsoever.
Happily some former grouse moors round here are now retired, having been sold off to organisations like the National Trust who don't permit shoots on their land. I note that TFA mentions that the most expensive shoots can cost £15k a day, this is a lower figure than the £20k that I heard as the going rate a decade or so ago, so perhaps demand for this ridiculous pastime is indeed declining.
posted by tomsk at 5:04 AM on June 3, 2022 [6 favorites]
I should also say that despite the nearest active grouse moor being just a couple of miles from my house, I cannot recall, in four decades of living in this area, ever seeing grouse on a menu here. It just doesn't end up in the plebian food chain.
posted by tomsk at 5:09 AM on June 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by tomsk at 5:09 AM on June 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
I took a cursory look into grouse numbers because at first I thought 700k grouse was perfectly reasonable and was going to point out as much. But the data seems to suggest otherwise, and it's possible that number is inflated by a factor of 10x or even 100x...
Total breeding grouse population of the UK is estimated to be lower than that number, so you certainly couldn't cull 700k a year and have any left over to shoot next year.
As you said though, it's not really about the grouse, is it?
Edit: on review, where did 700k come from? I double checked the article and didn't see it.
posted by jellywerker at 5:13 AM on June 3, 2022
Total breeding grouse population of the UK is estimated to be lower than that number, so you certainly couldn't cull 700k a year and have any left over to shoot next year.
As you said though, it's not really about the grouse, is it?
Edit: on review, where did 700k come from? I double checked the article and didn't see it.
posted by jellywerker at 5:13 AM on June 3, 2022
My brother and my Dad used to hunt grouse occasionally, which is a rather different thing here in Canada. They weren't very good at it, but they were good enough that I have eaten grouse a few times, which apparently makes me quite posh by UK standards.
My mother would cook it in heavy sauces so as limit how much you noticed you were eating grouse, which is frankly kinda nasty. I don't know if hanging it for longer would have made it more or less nasty than it was.
Fishing is much better, really. It's quieter, and you get to be on a boat, and at the end of the day, a rainbow trout lightly floured and then pan seared in butter is a pretty decent dinner.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:04 AM on June 3, 2022
My mother would cook it in heavy sauces so as limit how much you noticed you were eating grouse, which is frankly kinda nasty. I don't know if hanging it for longer would have made it more or less nasty than it was.
Fishing is much better, really. It's quieter, and you get to be on a boat, and at the end of the day, a rainbow trout lightly floured and then pan seared in butter is a pretty decent dinner.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:04 AM on June 3, 2022
Pheasant also like to wait until you are on top of them, to EXPLODE upward with noise! Hard to get off an accurate shot when startled. Mind, I'm talking about a pre-teen Goofyy with a target bow and arrow. LOL My dad used to hunt pheasant with a shot gun. They are very tasty, and no, we didn't hang them up to rot.
posted by Goofyy at 11:03 AM on June 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Goofyy at 11:03 AM on June 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
→
Can confirm. During some hillside repair event thing I did in Scotland in the early '90s, a ptarmigan (the farmed grouse's supposedly wiser cousin) was mooching around a rocky hillside near me. Whenever it became aware we were there, it would hurry to hide its head behind a small rock. I guess it reckoned that if it couldn't see us, we couldn't see it, despite its feathery arse being well out in the open.
At least it was smarter than the capercaillie, the huge loud grouse of dubious flying ability and ridiculous territorial aggression (I mean, just look at this thing ...), best known for endangering itself by flying into static objects
posted by scruss at 6:58 PM on June 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
these astonishingly stupid game birds
Can confirm. During some hillside repair event thing I did in Scotland in the early '90s, a ptarmigan (the farmed grouse's supposedly wiser cousin) was mooching around a rocky hillside near me. Whenever it became aware we were there, it would hurry to hide its head behind a small rock. I guess it reckoned that if it couldn't see us, we couldn't see it, despite its feathery arse being well out in the open.
At least it was smarter than the capercaillie, the huge loud grouse of dubious flying ability and ridiculous territorial aggression (I mean, just look at this thing ...), best known for endangering itself by flying into static objects
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posted by scruss at 6:58 PM on June 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Well now I'm baffled because I wrote that I scoffed at 700,00 and it's not in the article. It's not in the intro. But I definitely remember thinking "Pfff, 700,000?"
This is not helping with the constant edgy fear of changing timelines I got from watching Steins;Gate
posted by BinaryApe at 12:28 AM on June 4, 2022
This is not helping with the constant edgy fear of changing timelines I got from watching Steins;Gate
posted by BinaryApe at 12:28 AM on June 4, 2022
OK: mystery solved: My disbelief was not at the article but while checking something - the estimate for grouse deaths is 700,000 (Google "grouse 700,000) and my indignation was at the idea they are shot to be eaten, rather than shot for the joy of killing a small bird. No timeline change, I was just writing badly.
posted by BinaryApe at 12:35 AM on June 4, 2022
posted by BinaryApe at 12:35 AM on June 4, 2022
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