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Larks, Potted
Pluck and clean a dozen larks, cut off their heads and necks, open and flatten the birds, and season each one with a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Arrange them closely in a potting-pan, place a quarter of a pound of butter upon them, and bake them in a moderate oven. Take them out, pour off the butter, and put them in a cool, dry place until wanted. Time, twenty-five minutes to bake. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per dozen. Sufficient for three or four persons.
This is a preserved-meat recipe built on a songbird that is now protected across Britain, Europe and North America. It is printed here as a record of Victorian practice, not as something to cook.
- The bird is protectedThe skylark is protected in the UK under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and lark species in North America fall under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Under the EU Birds Directive the skylark is listed as huntable in certain member states, so the continental position is not uniform. In Britain, taking, killing, selling or possessing them is an offence.
- Potting is a preservation method, not a garnishThe instruction to keep the birds "in a cool, dry place until wanted" means storage at larder temperature. Note, though, that this version tells you to pour the butter off, and says nothing about covering the birds with a sealing layer. Cooked meat kept at ambient temperature with no acidity, no measured salt, no cure and no stated temperature is unsafe by modern standards.
- No verification step at allTwenty-five minutes in a "moderate oven" — conventionally glossed as somewhere in the region of 325–375F — may or may not bring small carcasses to a safe internal temperature, and the recipe offers no way to check. No reheating before serving is mentioned either, so anything that survives or multiplies in storage is eaten as is.
- "Potting-pan" and the butter quantityPotting-pans are generally described as small, deep, straight-sided pots of earthenware or tin, which would hold the birds packed close. Later potted-meat practice called for a layer of clarified butter poured cold over an already-cooled surface; here the butter is poured off instead, and no covering layer is specified.
- The price is the useful data1s. 6d. per dozen was cheap for the period, well below the price of a fowl, which helps explain how often small birds appear in books of this date.
- If you want the dishUse a current, tested recipe for potted poultry or potted game made with farmed birds, with refrigeration and a defined shelf life. Do not adapt the method above.
Small birds were ordinary English food for centuries, sold by the dozen in city markets and eaten whole; larks, thrushes, sparrows and (in later centuries) wheatears turn up in English cookery books over a long period, spitted, put in pies, or potted as here. Potting was a standard domestic answer to a glut before refrigeration: cook the flesh, pack it close, cover it with butter and keep it cool — a technique applied to shrimps, beef, hare, cheese and game birds alike. Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades, and its inclusion of larks reflects a moment when bird-catching for the table was still legal and commercially organised in Britain. Pressure from naturalists and early bird-protection societies through the later nineteenth century, and successive Wild Birds Protection Acts from 1880 onwards, gradually closed that trade down, so recipes like this survive as evidence of a food culture rather than as instructions anyone can follow.