Never mind turkey, goose, free range chickens good as they may be. The most delectable fowl, cooked properly, i.e. simply, is the wigeon. You can have your pheasant, your woodcock, your minuscule snipe, but a wigeon, roasted and eaten cold, is the best of all game, dishes. Nor is the cooking a problem. Just roast, with a teaspoonful or so of olive oil poured over it, a bay leaf! and half a glass of wine or so, at the base. It must be cold to give the full flavour, and preferably sliced thin.
Mrs Beeton can be wrong, for, while she does recommend game as being very nourishing, less fatty than poultry or butcher's meat, and particularly suitable for the invalid, she says this does not apply to wild fowl, which have "close, firm and rather oily flesh". She didn't obviously know wigeon.
David Cabot, by the way, tells us that up to 150,000 winter here, coming from Iceland. Scandinavia, north west Russia and south west Siberia: our most numerous wintering duck.
Interesting sign of the march of time: Mrs Beeton gives us a recipe for roast landrail, i.e. corncrake, and notes that the bird on arrival weighs a mere five ounces, but on departure weighs eight, "and is then most delicious eating". The book was first published in 1861. The advocates of the Raw Energy Diet, Leslie and Susannah Kenton, allow you, on the way to the ultimate, on your trial run so to speak, to eat at the conclusion on the ninth and tenth day a non vegetarian break.
For one meal you may have, and they put it in this order, a cooked piece of game, poultry or fish. Game, after all, is unlikely to be stuffed with antibiotics or growth, promoters or to have feasted on some feeding syffs that are now much disputed about.
By the way: wigeon and other wild birds may not be shot after January 31st, though some shops may have stocks after that.