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LARKS, ROAST (another way)
Prepare the larks as in the last recipe. Instead, however, of brushing them over with egg and dipping them in bread-crumbs, cover each bird entirely with a slice of fat bacon, and roast as before. Be careful that the larks are not sufficiently near each other to touch when on the skewer. Garnish with water-cress, and send gravy to table in a tureen. Time, about ten minutes to roast. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for two persons.
This is a recipe for wild songbirds, and that is the whole difficulty with it. The technique — barding small birds in fat bacon and roasting them fast — is sound; the bird is not obtainable, and in most of the world taking it is a criminal offence.
- The bird is protectedThe skylark is protected in the United Kingdom and listed under the EU Birds Directive, though a few member states (notably France) still allow limited traditional lark hunting under derogation. Sale is prohibited, and there is no commercial supply. In the United States the native horned lark is covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
- Why larks disappeared from the tableNineteenth-century netting for the table was done on a large scale — Victorian markets sold larks by the dozen and the hundred. That trade is usually cited as one of the pressures behind the protective legislation that followed.
- Wild-caught small birds carry their own risksBeyond the law, wild passerines are not inspected and may carry Salmonella and Campylobacter. Small birds of this kind were often cooked with the viscera in, though this entry does not say so. Ten minutes at a roasting heat is judged by the cook's eye, not by any measured internal temperature.
- Substitution does not rescue itQuail is the bird usually reached for, but it is roughly three times the weight of a lark and behaves quite differently under heat. Use a current quail recipe rather than treating this one as a set of timings to borrow.
- "Probable cost, 9d."Ninepence in pre-decimal currency, three-quarters of a shilling. Cassell's costs most entries this way for household budgeting.
- The one instruction worth keeping"Be careful that the larks are not sufficiently near each other to touch when on the skewer." Spacing birds on a spit or skewer so hot air circulates is still the difference between roasting and steaming, whatever you are cooking.
Larks were eaten in Britain and across Europe from the medieval period onward, and by the nineteenth century they were a commodity: netted in autumn on the downs and stubble fields, sent from Dunstable to Leadenhall market by the hundred, and sold cheap. Dunstable in Bedfordshire was well enough known for the trade that "Dunstable lark" appears as a term of praise in period cookery writing. Cassell's gives them several recipes — spitted, in pies, in puddings — because they were an unremarkable thing to find on a plate, small enough to be eaten whole, bones and all, and usually barded with bacon as here because a lark carries almost no fat of its own. The mass netting that made them so cheap is often said to have helped drive the protective bird legislation that began in the later nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth, which is why a recipe that was once cheap enough for anyone is now simply unmakeable.