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LARK PIE (to be eaten hot)
Take a dozen larks, empty them, cut off their heads, necks, and legs, roll the birds in flour, fill them with a forcemeat made of four table-spoonfuls of finely-grated bread-crumbs, half a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, the rind of a quarter of a lemon, finely minced, a small salt-spoonful of salt, and half a salt-spoonful of pepper. Place three or four slices of bacon and three or four slices of lean beef at the bottom of a pie-dish, put the larks upon them, and strew over them half a tea-spoonful of pepper, a table-spoonful of parsley, a shallot cut into small pieces, and a little salt, if required, but this will depend upon the condition of the bacon. Pour half a pint of weak stock over the whole, line the edges with a good crust, cover the dish with the same, and bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, from an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half. Probable cost of larks, 1s. 6d. per dozen. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
This is a recipe for a bird that can no longer be lawfully taken, sold or kept in Britain, Europe or North America. The notes below explain the obstacle and help with reading the original text rather than cooking from it.
- The birds are protectedThe skylark and its near relatives are protected species across the UK and EU, and in the United States virtually all native songbirds fall under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Killing, buying, selling or possessing them — or their carcasses — is an offence, and there is no legal commercial supply.
- No legitimate source existsThe 1s. 6d. a dozen quoted here reflects an open Victorian trade in small wild birds that has long since been closed. Birds offered as "larks" today are likely to come from illegal trapping, which remains a target of enforcement in parts of southern Europe.
- If you want the dishA raised or dished game pie built on a lawful bird is a different recipe with different quantities, timings and fat content. Use a current recipe written for whatever bird you can actually buy rather than adapting this one.
- Reading the quantitiesA salt-spoonful is roughly a quarter teaspoon. Half a pint in this book is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or about 1¼ US cups. "Weak stock" means a thin, unreduced broth, not a concentrated jus.
- "A moderate oven"The book gives no temperature; on a modern oven this is usually taken as somewhere around 350F (175C). The long bake — up to an hour and a half — is likely set by the raw beef and bacon in the base and the raw pastry lid rather than by the birds, which would cook in much less time.
- What the forcemeat tells youBreadcrumbs, parsley, lemon rind and pepper with no egg and no fat is a dry stuffing that relies entirely on the bacon and the stock for moisture.
Small-bird pies were standard English fare well into the nineteenth century, and larks in particular were netted in large numbers on the downs and sold by the dozen in London markets — Cassell's price of 1s. 6d. a dozen puts them among the cheaper things on a poulterer's slab. They belong to the same tradition as the pies of thrushes, wheatears and sparrows that appear in earlier cookery books. The pairing here with slices of lean beef and bacon at the bottom of the dish is a common device: the larger meats supply fat and gelatine that tiny birds cannot, and the resulting gravy is as much the point of the pie as the birds. The trade declined over several decades under the Wild Birds Protection Acts passed from 1880 onwards and their successors, part of a broader shift from regarding songbirds as food to regarding them as wildlife.