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LARKS (a la Macedoine)
Pick and clean two dozen larks, cut off their necks and heads, and fill them with a forcemeat made of their livers, finely minced, three ounces of veal, three ounces of fat bacon, a salt-spoonful of salt (if this be necessary), a quarter of a tea-spoonful of pepper, a table-spoonful of powdered sweet herbs, and a quarter of a nutmeg, grated. Pound the forcemeat well before putting it into the birds. Lay the larks in a deep dish, pour over them a pint of good gravy, and bake in a moderate oven. Dish them round mashed potatoes, and garnish with carrots and turnips, boiled and cut into small dice. Pour the gravy over, and serve. Time, a quarter of an hour to bake. Sufficient for eight or ten persons. Probable cost, 1s. 6d per dozen.
This dish cannot be made today, for one reason above all others: the birds. Skylarks and the related field larks that fed Victorian kitchens are now protected across their range.
- The birds are protectedSkylarks (Alauda arvensis) are protected as wild birds in the United Kingdom under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and are covered by the EU Birds Directive, though the species is listed on Annex II and limited hunting is still permitted in a few member states. In the United States the native horned lark is protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. In Britain, killing, selling or possessing them is an offence and there is no lawful supply.
- Not a matter of substitutionThe recipe depends on twenty-four birds small enough to bake through in fifteen minutes. Nothing in a modern butcher's case behaves that way. If you want a stuffed small-bird dish, use a current recipe written for farmed quail and follow its own times.
- Why the population collapsedSkylark numbers in Britain fell by more than half over the late twentieth century, largely through the shift to autumn-sown cereals, which leaves no stubble and no safe nesting window. The bird went from a market commodity priced by the dozen to a conservation priority within a century.
- The wild-game caveatThe forcemeat here is built on the birds' own livers, and liver in wild-caught small game can concentrate contaminants from whatever the bird has been feeding on. That is a reason for caution the original text does not address.
- On the original's timingA quarter of an hour in a moderate oven (the book gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally glossed at somewhere around 350F) tells you how slight these carcasses were. It is also far too short to bring a raw veal-and-bacon forcemeat to a safe temperature in any larger bird, which is a second reason not to scale the method onto poultry.
- Reading the cost line1s. 6d. per dozen was a modest market price, on the order of two or three loaves of bread at the time, though the two dozen the recipe requires was not a trifling outlay. Larks were sold by the dozen in city markets as an ordinary game bird rather than a luxury.
Cassell's places this among dozens of small-bird recipes that no modern general cookbook would carry: larks, wheatears, ortolans, plovers and thrushes all had their own entries, netted in quantity and sold by the dozen in British and continental markets through the nineteenth century. The name a la Macedoine refers to the garnish rather than the bird, a macedoine being a mixture of vegetables cut into small even dice, so called from at least the eighteenth century by supposed analogy with the mixed peoples of Macedonia, an etymology usually given as traditional rather than documented. The dish belongs to a moment when wild songbirds were an ordinary, cheap food and their supply seemed inexhaustible; the collapse of that assumption, and the protective legislation that followed across Europe and North America, is the reason these pages now read as history rather than instruction.