Reed Birds
Roasting by suspending on the little wire which accompanies the roaster, is the best method; turn and baste frequently, or wash and peel with as thin a paring as possible large potatoes of equal size, cut a deep slice off one end of each, and scoop out a part of the potato; drop a piece of butter into each bird, pepper and salt, and put it in the hollows made in the potatoes; put on as covers the pieces cut off, and clip the other end for them to stand on. Set in a baking pan upright, with a little water to prevent burning, bake slowly, and serve in the dish in which they were baked.
Or, boil in a crust like dumplings.
The bird in this recipe is not a bird anyone can legally buy, shoot or serve in the United States today. The method is sound cookery; the ingredient is off the table.
- What a reed bird is"Reed bird" is the market name for the bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), shot by the thousand in the rice and reed marshes of the Atlantic coast in autumn when the birds were fat on grain. Ricebird and butterbird are the same animal under other names.
- Fully protectedThe bobolink is covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and taking, possessing, selling or serving one is a federal offense. There is no season, no bag limit and no legal supply. The same applies to nearly every other small songbird that appears in nineteenth-century game chapters.
- Population historyMarket gunning of the kind this recipe assumes, combined later with loss of hay meadow nesting habitat, has been implicated in steep declines. The species is still flagged as a bird of conservation concern in parts of its range. Its protection is absolute rather than seasonal simply because it is a non-game migratory bird covered outright by the Act.
- No substitution offered hereCooks who want small roast birds should work from a current recipe for farmed quail or squab, which are raised for the table and sold legally. We are not adapting this one.
- The vesselThe "roaster" with its accompanying wire is most likely a tin reflector oven set on the hearth in front of an open fire, with the bird hung to turn on a wire and the drippings caught below. It is a piece of equipment, not a covered dish, and today it is met with mainly as an antique or a reproduction.
- Boiled in a crustThe closing line, "boil in a crust like dumplings," would mean enclosing each bird in suet pastry and boiling it, on the same principle as a small steamed pudding.
Reed birds sat at the cheap end of the nineteenth-century game market: sold cheaply, eaten whole, and treated more as a garnish or a savory course than as a serious meal. Their appearance in Buckeye Cookery (1877) reflects a period in which wild birds of every size were a routine grocery item rather than a regulated resource, and the market hunting that supplied them was among the pressures behind the reform movement that produced the Lacey Act of 1900 and, later, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The potato trick here is genuinely clever: a hollowed potato acts as its own basting vessel and casing for a bird with almost no fat of its own, cooking the starch in the drippings while keeping the flesh from drying. The technique is worth remembering even though the bird it was written for is now permanently out of reach.