Crow Pie

Woodhouse Eaves, 1919. Photo courtesy of the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland.

Mrs Wainwright: We used to have a crow shoot at Beaumanor. There was a big avenue of elm trees and the crows built in there, and also through the village they used to build in a spinney near the lodge and every May 12th they used to have a crow shoot. The farmers were invited and, well, anyone that was interested, people on the estate. They used to shoot crows and we used to made crow pie. Dreadful job preparing crows, you don’t pluck them like you pluck an ordinary fowl, you skin them. And of course it’s, oh it’s a dreadful job, covered in black feathers and all that sort of thing. You stew them like you would make, you stew them and then make them like a rabbit pie, put a crust on. You only use the breast and the legs if they’re big enough, you don’t, you discard everything else because the back is bitter. Crow pie, you want about a dozen rooks for a pie, and have it cold. And it was all jellied, we always put bacon in everything, we used striped bacon, streaky bacon for cooking in anything like that, for rabbit pie we always put bacon into it. But the crows, you know they used to come over in morning at a set time just as it was drawing light. And at Woodhouse these crows used to go up into the forest, then they used to go amongst the ploughed fields and pick up a living there, then fly back again at a set time at night, and they always had one that was a leader and they’d always one that followed on behind and they used to call him the ‘school master’! And there were two flocks of crows used to be around, one was Perry Herrick’s crows from Beaumanor, there was also a flock used to come from Prestwold Hall, and they were Hussey Packe’s crows – aha! – so the old people used to say.

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