Reed Birds
Prepare very carefully, secure them to a wooden skewer by strings, salt, dredge with flour, and roast with a quick heat fifteen minutes. Serve on toast, with butter and pepper.
Reed birds may be broiled on a gridiron, seasoned with salt, pepper, and butter, and serve on a dish with tomatoes.
The bird at the centre of this recipe cannot legally be taken, sold, or served in the United States or Canada today, and no adjustment to the cooking makes that different.
- The bird is protected"Reed bird" was the market name for the bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), a small migratory songbird shot in enormous numbers in the marshes of the mid-Atlantic states. It has been protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act since 1918; killing, possessing, or selling one is a federal offence. Other small marsh birds were sometimes sold under the same market name and are also covered by the Act, though some of them, such as the sora rail, still have regulated hunting seasons.
- No lawful source existsUnlike quail or squab, reed birds were never domesticated and there is no farmed equivalent on the market. Anything offered for sale under the name today is either mislabelled or illegal.
- Eaten whole, entrails includedOften eaten whole -- Birds this small were in some kitchens cooked and eaten undrawn, though period American cookbooks also direct that they be cleaned; the recipe's "prepare very carefully" does not say which is meant. Either way these were birds handled fast, in a period when cold storage for game was limited.
- If you came here to cookUse a current recipe for quail, squab, or another lawfully sold small bird. This page is worth reading as a record of what a 1900 game larder held, not as instructions.
Bobolinks fatten heavily on wild rice and marsh grasses on their autumn migration south, and by the 1870s the birds were being shot by the barrel along the Delaware and Chesapeake and shipped to city markets, where they appeared on hotel menus as "reed birds" or, further south, "rice birds" — the same species that Carolina planters cursed for stripping their rice fields. A cook's book from 1900 could assume them as casually as it assumed quail, which is exactly the point: the game chapters of these volumes are full of species that market hunting pursued hard, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 — implementing a treaty signed in 1916 — is the reason the recipe now reads as a historical document. The method itself — skewered, floured, roasted hot and briefly, served on toast to catch the fat — is the standard nineteenth-century treatment for any bird small enough to be eaten in two bites.