Snow Birds
Stuff each bird with an oyster, place in a dish, add little boiled pork, and oyster liquor, season well with butter, pepper and salt. Cover the dish with a rich crust and bake in a moderate oven.
This is a pie of whole small songbirds, and the birds themselves are the problem: the dish cannot legally or ethically be made in the United States or most of Europe today.
- The bird is protected"Snow bird" in nineteenth-century American usage means the snow bunting or, more often, the dark-eyed junco — small wild passerines. Both are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which makes it an offence to take, kill, possess or sell them, and comparable protection applies across Europe under the Birds Directive. The birds cannot be sourced lawfully.
- Why they were once cheapSongbirds were netted or shot in quantity in winter and sold cheaply by the dozen, which is why a cookbook can treat them as a casual pie filling rather than a delicacy. Market hunting of this kind was among the practices the 1918 treaty was written to end.
- The oysters are also of their timeThe recipe assumes cheap, abundant, shucked oysters with their liquor sold by the quart — the same market logic as the birds. Oyster liquor is now a byproduct you save from shucking rather than something you buy by volume.
- "Boiled pork"This most likely means salt pork, simmered to draw out some of the cure, added for fat and seasoning rather than as a meat component; the recipe does not specify. Enriching a lean wild bird with pork fat was common in the period.
- If you want the dishA current recipe for a game-bird or quail pie from a farmed, legally sold species should be used. Do not adapt the instructions above to wild birds.
Small-bird pies run deep in English and American cookery, and they survived in print long after they had stopped being respectable. In the United States the trade in songbirds for the table flourished in the nineteenth century, when market gunners supplied city restaurants with buntings, robins and bobolinks; the practice was one of the abuses that drove the founding of the Audubon societies in the 1880s and 1890s and, eventually, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. A recipe like this one assumes the pie is an ordinary winter supper, of a kind that within a generation would be a crime. The pairing with oysters is the other period marker dinred oysters were the cheap bulking ingredient of American cooking before 1900, stuffed into turkeys, minced into sauces and, here, tucked one to a bird.