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Larks in Aspic
Bone the required number of larks; fill them with liver forcemeat, wrap up each lark tightly in a small piece of muslin, braise in a rich stock, and put aside to cool. Line with aspic jelly as many small oblong moulds as there are larks, decorate the bottoms and sides with truffles and hard-boiled white of egg, and allow the jelly to set. Unwrap the larks, put one in each mould, fill up with aspic, and place in the ice-chest or other cool place to set. Unmould, dish up, garnish with parsley, and serve.
The obstacle here is not technique but the bird. Larks are the whole point of the dish, and they are no longer lawful game in Britain, most of Europe or North America.
- The birds are protectedSkylarks and their relatives are protected songbirds under the UK Wildlife and Countryside Act and, in North America, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Within the EU they fall under the Birds Directive, though the skylark remains huntable in a small number of member states. In Britain and North America taking, killing, selling or possessing them is an offence, and there is no legal commercial supply.
- No substitution is offered hereSmall game birds are sold legally in some markets, but this page is not the place for a conversion. If you want a boned small bird set in aspic, work from a current recipe written for a species you can lawfully buy.
- Aspic and the cold chainEven setting the bird aside, the only chilling the method offers is 'the ice-chest or other cool place', and it gives no guidance on holding time. A braised, boned bird held in gelatine at cellar temperature is a textbook environment for slow bacterial growth; modern aspic work is done under continuous refrigeration and eaten within a day or two.
- Liver forcemeatThe recipe names the filling but does not specify it; period liver forcemeats are generally liver, fat and seasoning worked to a paste, and here it would be cooked only by the braise inside the muslin wrapper. Any modern version needs a verified internal temperature, which the original never mentions.
- What the muslin is forThe cloth is a shaping device, not a cooking bag. Wrapped tightly, the boned bird holds its plump oval form through the braise instead of collapsing, so it sits cleanly in the mould.
- Aspic, in period termsAspic of this kind is a clarified veal or poultry stock set with its own gelatine, cleared with egg white and often seasoned with sherry or tarragon vinegar. Commercial gelatine was available by this period as well.
Larks were a standard item of the European table for centuries, netted in autumn in enormous numbers and sold by the dozen; lark pies were a recognised speciality of Dunstable and of Leipzig, and Escoffier's generation still listed mauviettes among the small game. Cassell's places this among the cold larder work of a large household: boned, stuffed, braised, then suspended in clear jelly with truffle and egg-white decoration, in the buffet style that dominated late Victorian formal service, where a dish was judged as much by how it looked under lamplight as by how it tasted. The collapse of European songbird populations through the twentieth century turned that abundance into scarcity, and successive protection laws \— Britain's from the 1950s onward, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 in the United States — curtailed the trade, though lark hunting continues lawfully in parts of southern Europe. The recipe survives now as a record of what a Victorian kitchen considered unremarkable.