Who took the Rook?

Most farmers would agree that there’s very little to beat the taste of a hot, nourishing pie for supper after a hard day’s work in the fields.

- Adam Henson

But you would have to be very hungry indeed to want to tuck into a rook pie. At least these days, when food trends and public taste are more sophisticated than ever. Yet it wasn’t so long ago that the glossy black-feathered birds regularly featured on farm workers’ dinner tables in the Cotswolds and hardly anyone batted an eyelid when a couple of plump rook breasts were cooked under a pastry lid. Older generations might remember hard times when rural families struggling to make ends meet couldn’t afford to be squeamish when it came to mealtimes. Rook was wholesome, plentiful and even if it wasn’t exactly to everybody’s taste, at least it was freely available. It’s no surprise that it came in to its own during wartime when rationing and the scarcity of fresh meat forced people to find more ingenious ways to feed their households. In 1940, even the letters page of The Times published requests for rook pie recipes.