Your gamekeeper is a skilled cook, and his open-air kitchen is a
place of curious interest. For the first five or six weeks of their
lives young pheasants are regaled several times daily with meals of
hard-boiled eggs, custard, biscuit-meal, oatmeal, canary-seed, greaves
and rice--seasoned with spices. Look into the keeper's hut in the
woods, and you will see quite a collection of sacks filled with choice
foods--cracked maize, dari-seed, groats, rice, preparations of dried
meat, and finely dressed meals of wheat and barley. When the birds have
learned to go to roost only one meal a day is provided. In his kitchen
the keeper prepares a thin meat soup, sometimes of sheeps' heads; this
is boiled, then cooled, chopped lettuce and onion, and barley and
other meals are added, and then the rations of the pudding-like mass
are rolled into small pellets. Over the keeper's kitchen the keeper's
wife has no jurisdiction. In some sheltered corner from which he can
keep an eye on his birds he builds himself a fireplace of two parallel
rows of bricks open at each end, so that he may burn long sticks and
save himself the labour of chopping wood if pressed for time. Sometimes
he will get the village blacksmith to fashion a sort of iron gallows
from which to hang his great cooking-pots, each containing eight or
nine gallons, and of no small weight. By November many keepers have
cooked the last meal for their pheasants--others may be preparing a
final supper, whistling till their jaws ache to call the birds to
the meal--on the morrow to do their utmost to send the long-tails to
destruction.
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