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 in Cases
Bone the larks, fill them with a nicely prepared forcemeat, wrap a small slice of cold ham round each, and put them into small china cases--one in each case. Put over them a little pepper and salt, a few chopped mushrooms, and a table-spoonful of good gravy, and cover with fine bread-crumbs. Put a tiny piece of butter on top of each, and bake for twenty minutes in a moderate oven. Arrange nicely on a napkin placed on a silver dish, and garnish with parsley.
This dish cannot be prepared today, and the obstacle is the main ingredient rather than the method.
- The bird is protectedSkylarks and the other small songbirds sold as "larks" in Victorian markets are protected in the UK under the Wildlife and Countryside Act and in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Taking, killing, possessing or selling them is a criminal offence, and there is no legal supply of them for the table.
- No lawful substitute is impliedThere is no legal market supply of wild passerines for the table in Britain or the United States, and nothing sold as game today corresponds to a boned lark. Anyone wanting a stuffed, ham-wrapped small bird in individual cases should work from a current recipe using farmed poultry or quail.
- What the market once suppliedNineteenth-century poulterers sold larks by the dozen, plucked. The recipe still expects the cook to bone them, which is the most laborious part of the job.
- ForcemeatA bound stuffing of minced meat or panada with breadcrumbs, suet or butter, herbs and egg, made separately and used here as a prepared component.
- China casesThe "small china cases" are individual ovenproof porcelain vessels, sent to table in the dish they were baked in.
- ServingThe recipe puts one lark in each case, and the cases go to table on a folded napkin laid over a silver dish, with parsley.
Small birds were a genuine article of commerce in Britain and across Europe well into the twentieth century: larks, wheatears, thrushes and ortolan were netted or limed in quantity, sent to city markets, and treated in cookery books as an ordinary cheap delicacy rather than as anything remarkable. Cassell's places this among a run of similar entries, of a kind readers could buy by the dozen at the poulterer's, much as they would buy pigeons. The individual china case, baked and served in one vessel, was a fashionable late-Victorian way of presenting expensive small portions the same logic that produced coquilles and shirred eggs. What the entry mainly records now is the scale of a trade that later conservation law would curtail: bird-protection acts in Britain from the 1880s onward, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 in the United States, of which the market that made recipes like this one routine was one strand among several.