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Larks, Roast
Pick and clean half a dozen larks, cut off the legs, and pick out the gizzards with the point of a knife. Season the birds lightly with a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, and strew a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley over each; brush them with beaten yolk of egg, sprinkle bread-crumbs upon them, run them upon a long skewer, fasten each end of this to the spit, and put them down to a clear fire. Baste plentifully with butter, and strew more bread-crumbs over them while roasting, until within five minutes of their being done enough, then leave them to brown. Dish them on fried bread-crumbs, and garnish the dish with slices of lemon. Time to roast, from ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for two persons.
The technique here is straightforward spit-roasting, but the bird at the centre of it is no longer available to a domestic cook in Britain, Europe or North America.
- The birds are protectedSkylarks and their relatives are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 in the UK, under EU birds legislation across Europe, and under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in the United States. Taking, killing, selling or possessing them is an offence, and there is no legal supply route for a home kitchen.
- No substitution is impliedNothing in this entry can be scaled or adapted into a lawful dish. If you want small roast birds crumbed and spit-roasted, work from a current recipe for farmed quail and follow its own timings.
- "Pick out the gizzards"Small game birds were traditionally cooked undrawn apart from the gizzard, the intestines being eaten with the bird. This is a period practice that modern food-safety guidance for poultry does not support.
- Cost and yieldNinepence for six birds serving two, as the entry states, is a marker of how cheap wild small game was relative to butcher's meat when Cassell's was compiled.
- "A clear fire"This means a coal or wood fire burned down past the smoking stage to steady, flameless radiant heat, with the birds turning on a spit in front of it rather than sitting over it. It is a radiant-roast method, not an oven method, and the ten to fifteen minutes given assumes it.
- Fried bread-crumbsThe bed the birds are dished on is crumbs fried in butter until crisp and golden, a standard Victorian accompaniment to roast game birds and still served with pheasant and grouse today.
Small songbirds were a staple of European cookery for centuries, sold by the dozen in markets from Rome to Leipzig, and Cassell's treats larks much as it treats other small wild birds — as a cheap seasonal delicacy rather than anything exotic. Britain's nineteenth-century lark trade was substantial: birds were netted in large numbers on the downs and in the fields around Dunstable, whose name became attached to lark pies and puddings in print. The birds' collapse in the twentieth century, driven far more by agricultural change than by the pot, is why they now sit on protected lists across their range, and why an entry like this reads as a record of a vanished food economy rather than as a set of instructions.