Black magic for May

For Neil Cross, mid May is the time to engage with the branchers at a Suffolk rookery, while Serena Cross is busting clays on behalf of the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers

NDC

Next to the irrepressible and iridescent starling, the rook has to be my favourite British bird. This gregarious parliamentarian produces one of the most evocative sounds in our countryside, instantly bringing to mind the bucolic image of stately elms in a rectory garden or of misty mornings behind the plough. It is a raucous call and only a rooky mother could find music in it. Over the centuries, this has combined less than benevolently with the rook’s ink-black plumage, scaly grey face and pick-axe bill to give the bird a bad name.

However, there was a time when rooks made up both an important part of the social ritual and the protein intake of rural communities. The formalised shooting of young ‘brancher’ rooks in mid May reached its apogee (like many sporting traditions) during Victoria’s reign, when young ladies were encouraged to wield dainty single-shot rifles, made specially for the job by the ever-enterprising gun trade. These beauties flung a slug of solid lead skywards towards the swaying fledglings and must have inflicted significant collateral damage across neighbouring parishes as they hurtled earthwards having passed through, or wide of, the rook.

During the last war, when meat was rationed, rooks attained an almost mythical value of 2/9 each. By this time, the rook rifles had largely been replaced by shotguns and this remains the safest and most humane method of gathering a few for a pie in mid May. A highlight of my youth was to be taken to the rookery by my father, armed with my single-barrel, folding .410 and allowed to engage them at will. The tiny 2in paper cartridges looked puny but they pulled the branchers down like stones and those outings remain as red-letter days in my mind.

Nowadays, I’m fortunate enough to be asked up to Suffolk by a great friend with access to an expansive rookery. We shoot enough for a pie and then leave them in peace. As Prue Coats says in her Poacher’s Cookbook, the rook breasts should be soaked overnight in milk to remove any bitterness and then baked in a rich stock, often using a pig’s trotter to thicken and enrich it. I have always found rook pie enormously satisfying in a rustic, seasonal sort of way and I can’t recommend it enough. However, my attempts at Corvid Curry, which resulted in a batch of Rooky Tikka pasties, is certainly best forgotten.