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Fieldfares, Roasted
These birds are trussed and roasted like a partridge. When put before a bright fire, baste well with butter or dripping, and froth nicely a few minutes before serving. Send to table hot on fried bread-crumbs, with a tureen of gravy, and another of bread sauce. Time, from fifteen to twenty minutes. Fieldfares are seldom to be bought. Sufficient for a dish, four.
This is a recipe for a small migratory thrush that can no longer legally be taken or sold in Britain or across most of Europe. The notes below explain why the page is now a historical document rather than a set of instructions.
- The bird is protectedThe fieldfare (Turdus pilaris) is a wild thrush that winters in Britain in flocks. It is protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and is listed on Schedule 1; killing, taking or selling one is an offence. Elsewhere in Europe the position varies: under the EU Birds Directive the fieldfare is a species that may still be hunted in certain member states, though commercial sale is generally prohibited.
- Cassell's own note tells the story"Fieldfares are seldom to be bought" was already true when this was printed; the wording implies they were an irregular rather than a stocked item. Much of the supply of small birds came through shooting and netting rather than the poulterer, and there is no lawful commercial supply today.
- No substitution is offered hereSmall game birds are sometimes suggested as stand-ins for thrushes, but the method as printed — a hot open fire, fifteen to twenty minutes, and birds served whole — is written for this species and is not something to reconstruct from this page. Use a current recipe for whatever bird you can lawfully buy.
- Reading the termsTo froth a roast is to dredge it with flour and baste it near the end so the skin crisps and blisters. Fried bread-crumbs here are crumbs browned in butter and spread over the dish as a base, standard nineteenth-century practice for small roasted birds.
- Quantity"Sufficient for a dish, four" is ambiguous: it may mean four birds make up one dish, or that the dish serves four. A single fieldfare is only a mouthful or two, which makes the first reading plausible, but the page does not settle it.
Small thrushes were eaten across Europe for centuries, and the fieldfare in particular is often said to have had a reputation among British sportsmen as a delicacy of hard winters, when flocks arrived from Scandinavia to strip hedgerow berries. Roman writers praise fattened thrushes, and the birds remained a recognised, if occasional, item of the game larder well into the nineteenth century. Their disappearance from the kitchen came partly through changing taste and partly through the long campaign against the wild-bird trade that produced the Wild Birds Protection Acts of the later 1800s and, eventually, the comprehensive protection these species have today.