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Larks in Batter Pudding
Mix six table-spoonfuls of flour very smoothly with four table-spoonfuls of water, four well-beaten eggs, and a pint of milk. Add a tea-spoonful of salt and half a tea-spoonful of pepper. Grease a pie-dish thickly, pour in the batter, and put into it half a dozen larks, which have been picked, cleaned, and trussed, with a slice of bacon fastened round each. Bake in a good oven. Time to bake, two hours. Probable cost of larks, 1s. 6d. per dozen. Sufficient for five or six persons.
The batter is straightforward; the birds are the problem. This dish cannot lawfully or ethically be made today in Britain, Europe or North America.
- The birds are protectedThe lark of this recipe is the skylark (Alauda arvensis), a wild songbird. In the UK it is fully protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, where killing, selling or possessing it is an offence. Under the EU Birds Directive it is listed as huntable in certain member states, though trade and taking are tightly restricted elsewhere; in the United States native larks are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
- Not a market birdThe "1s. 6d. per dozen" reflects a nineteenth-century trade in netted wild birds that no longer exists. There is no legal supplier, farmed or wild, and no game dealer will source them.
- A conservation matter, not only a legal oneSkylark numbers in Britain fell steeply through the twentieth century with changes in arable farming, and the bird is on the UK red list of conservation concern. The scale of the Victorian market — birds sold by the dozen and the hundred — is part of that history.
- Substitution is not a fixSmall game birds such as quail behave very differently in a two-hour bake, and this page is not the place for a rewritten version. If you want a batter pudding with meat baked in it, use a current recipe written for the bird you can actually buy.
- What the batter tells youSix tablespoons flour, four of water, four eggs and a pint of milk is a thin, egg-heavy batter of the Yorkshire-pudding type. The recipe specifies only 'a good oven' and gives no temperature; two hours is long enough to cook the birds through inside the batter rather than simply to puff it.
Larks were an ordinary item of Victorian commerce, not a rarity: netted in vast numbers on the downs and stubbles, sent to Leadenhall Market by the hamper, and sold cheap by the dozen. Dunstable in Bedfordshire was the trade's most famous source, and "Dunstable larks" are documented in English cookery writing chiefly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The dish is really a batter pudding he--hole or the pudding baked under a joint — with the small birds standing in for sausage or dripping, each wrapped in bacon to supply the fat a lark does not have. The recipe survives chiefly as evidence of how completely the boundary between wild bird and grocery has moved: what a Victorian cook bought without comment is now, in most of the world, a protected species.