doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Surprising vitality of ancient ammunition

I had occasion, 25-30 years ago to "pull down" a case (1000 rounds) of ca. 1912 UMC 43 Spanish ammunition which had been improperly stored in South America and wouldn't fire. The ammo was Berdan primed and loaded with black powder, and the purpose was to salvage the cases. After pulling the bullets and emptying the powder, I deprimed the cases hydraulicly. Out of the thousand rounds, there were something over 20 cases that the black powder had corroded enough that the pressure escaped through the holes in the case walls, instead of forcing the primers out. There were other cases from that batch that split after reloading with light charges of Unique. If the case survived the first firing, they were OK for reloading again with moderate loads. The holes in the cases and the splits looked very much like the Rook cartridge cases shown above. It was my opinion that the failures were caused by the black powder, but I salvaged it also and it still fired with no apparent problems. BTW, the cases were folded head type, so headspace had to be within specs. to avoid head splits.
Mike

Mike, during the depression my parents saved everything, rubber bands, string, marmalade jars.... So like you we grew up being frugal. But this salvage effort and the time it took truly tops the list. Well done.

So what does a rook taste like? And don’t say chicken

The usual recipe for cooking rooks (that is the baby rooks that have just fledged after being fed a diet of insects from cow pats) is to take off the two breasts and throw away the rest. Never try to eat a fully grown bird...

Then marinate the breasts in milk overnight, discard the milk and marinate again overnight with fresh milk. Then they can be pan fried or stewed as you prefer. They apparently taste like a very gamey pigeon. The full recipe is in the Wal Winfer rook rifle books.

I believe that rook shooting was really just an excuse to have a day out shooting before the tennis and horse racing season began, and after the end of the pheasant season on 1st February. The traditional date is the first weekend of May.

The Scots used to eat puffins too, but times were hard in the Hebrides!

HB

Nice to see this old thread still has a vitality of its own.

When Mrs. Parabola cooked Rook Pies she used a recipe from Mrs. Beeton’s Cookbook. It involved marinating in milk as described by HB, used stewing steak with the breasts of the young Rooks. She thinks it also included hard boiled eggs but it was a long time ago.

The steak cooked down to a jelly/gravy leaving the Rook meat intact.

As to taste, much like a well flavoured pigeon.

It is no doubt much better than Cormorant, for which an old Sussex recipe reads:-

“Pluck or skin Cormorant. Wrap bird in muslin. Bury in damp earth for 2 weeks. Forget where you buried it.”.

I thought as much. Sounds like the old Virginia recipe for roasting spring shad on an oak plank. “When shad is fully cooked, remove from oak plank. Throw shad away and eat the plank.” Seriously though, in the old days food insecurity meant eating the rooks and shad because there was nothing else. A lot is taken for granted nowadays.

Gen. Pickett was at a Shad bake when his division surrendered at Five Forks.

I have a recipe for crow from a book published by Field and Stream magazine in the early 1960s. The breasts end up in a casserole pan in the oven, cooking in sour kraut. No, I have never tried it, and can’t think of a single good reason to attempt that, now. The same book suggests that opossums are tolerable if you capture them and get them on a diet of persimmons for a month or so, before the attempt of turning them into table fare.

I’ve never been that hungry.

As a kid, we tried to eat a lessor Canada goose, that I suspect had a strong preference for mollusks, or some other nasty creature that lives in mud. The oven stunk up the kitchen, and, when it was over, the dog wouldn’t eat it.

Best,
Ted

Argo44,
I was helping the family of an old friend that had a business loading custom ammunition and the son-in-law was helping the widow sell the shop items. Since he was not adept at that kind of work, I did it so they could sell the cases, I left the cleaning and polishing to him. You can't sell powder in off brand containers, so I kept it and kept the bullets because they were severely marked by pulling them. I sized some of the bullets to .427" and used then in 45-70 class loads for deer hunting with my 404 Jeffery.
As fate would have it, I ran across a You Tube video that was partly appropriate to the subject of this thread. You Tube Mr. Pete 222, #1052 What caused the crack? was a discussion of a crack in the body of a brass blow torch but lead to stress cracks and cracks in WW1 ammunition exacerbated by horse urine (ammonia). It will more than worth the effort to watch it, as well as his many other videos.
Mike

I’m not inclined to try Puffin hunting…..or eating!


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5EJBSOXpzs4&pp=ygUccHVmZmluIGh1bnRpbmcgZmFyb2UgaXNsYW5kcw%3D%3D