Important: Safety Warning
This page describes collecting wild birds' eggs, shooting birds for specimens, or similar practices. These activities are now illegal under wildlife-protection laws, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and they contributed to the decline of the very species described.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Larks, Croustade Of
Bone a dozen and a half larks, cut off the legs and heads, open, season them slightly, and put a small piece of veal forcemeat and a truffle into each bird, roll the larks up to a ball-shape, put them into a pie-dish, season them slightly with salt and pepper, and pour three ounces of clarified butter over them; then bake in a hot oven for a quarter of an hour. Dish them in a fried bread croustade prepared as follows. Cut the crust from a stale loaf, about eight inches long, scoop it out in the centre, and fry it in very hot lard till it is brightly browned; drain and dry it, and stick it in the middle of the dish, with a paste made of white of egg and flour. Before putting the larks into it, put it in the oven for a few minutes to get hot. Garnish with stewed mushrooms and aspic jelly, and send a pint of good brown sauce to table in a tureen. Probable cost of larks, 1s. 6d. per dozen. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
This dish cannot be made today: its main ingredient is a protected wild songbird. The notes below explain what stands in the way and how to read the rest of the text.
- The birdsSkylarks are protected in the United Kingdom under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, and larks native to North America are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Taking, killing, possessing or selling them is a criminal offence, and no lawful supply exists. Netting on the scale this recipe assumes is no longer lawful.
- Eighteen birds per dishA lark yields perhaps an ounce of meat once boned, so a serving for six here consumed a dozen and a half whole birds. The quantity is the clearest sign of how cheap and abundant wild small birds were treated as being, and why the trade was eventually stopped.
- Not a case of substitutionFarmed quail is sometimes offered as a stand-in, but the boning, forcemeat stuffing and timing here are scaled to a bird a fraction of that size, and nothing in the method transfers cleanly. If you want a croustade of small birds, work from a current recipe written for a legal species.
- Croustade, in this periodNot pastry. Here it is a hollowed-out block cut from a stale loaf and deep-fried, used as an edible serving vessel — a technique that survives in fried bread canapé bases.
- The egg-and-flour pasteBeaten egg white worked with flour served as a kitchen glue for fixing set-pieces to a platter so they would not slide when carried to table. It is structural rather than a sauce, and presumably not intended to be eaten.
- The price noteLarks are costed here at one shilling and sixpence per dozen; like other small birds they were sold and priced by the dozen.
Small wild birds were a staple of European cookery for centuries, eaten whole or boned and stuffed, and larks in particular were netted in enormous numbers across England, France and Italy through the nineteenth century and sold by the dozen in city markets. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, was an encyclopaedic household reference that aimed to list everything a cook might conceivably be handed, which is why larks sit in the same alphabet as lard and lemonade. The elaborate presentation here — birds rolled to balls, set in a fried bread case cemented to the dish, garnished with aspic and sent out with a tureen of brown sauce — belongs to the late Victorian dinner, where a dish was expected to arrive as a constructed object. Britain's protective legislation for wild birds developed piecemeal, beginning with the Sea Birds Preservation Act of 1869, and hardened through the twentieth century; recipes like this one survive as evidence of an appetite rather than as anything to cook from.