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, Stewed
Pick and clean a dozen larks; open them, and fry them with two ounces of fat bacon, cut into small pieces, until they are lightly browned; dredge a little flour over them, and add half a pound of mushrooms, cut into slices, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and as much salt as is required; this will be regulated by the condition of the bacon. Pour over them a wine-glassful of stock and another of sherry, and simmer gently for a quarter of an hour. Add a table-spoonful of finely-minced parsley, boil for a minute, and serve on a hot dish. Garnish with toasted sippets. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per dozen. Sufficient for three or four persons.
This dish cannot be reproduced today: its principal ingredient is a wild songbird that is protected across Europe and North America. The notes below are for reading the recipe, not for cooking it.
- The birds are protectedThe lark of English cookery is the skylark, Alauda arvensis. In the United Kingdom it is protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981; in the United States, skylarks and native songbirds fall under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes taking, possessing or selling them an offence. There is no legal supply, wild or farmed.
- Why the price line matters"Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per dozen" records a commercial trade in wild-caught small birds, sold by the dozen in Victorian markets. Sustained demand of this kind is generally counted among the pressures on small-bird populations, and such trades were among the targets of the later protection laws.
- Trapping is the hidden stepThe recipe begins at "pick and clean a dozen larks" because the reader was expected to buy or net them. Netting, liming and shooting small passerines are all separately illegal, and no part of the sourcing can be carried out lawfully.
- Not a substitution problemQuail and other farmed game birds are cooked in broadly similar ways, but they are differently sized, differently boned and differently timed, and the fifteen-minute simmer here is written for a bird weighing only an ounce or so whole. Use a current recipe written for the bird you actually have.
- Reading the measuresA wine-glassful is conventionally taken as about 2 fl oz, which would make the liquid roughly a quarter cup of stock and the same of sherry. "Toasted sippets" are small triangles or fingers of toast used as an edible garnish and to soak up sauce.
- The technique, for interestThe method is a straightforward brown stew: render diced bacon, brown the birds in the fat, dredge with flour to bind, then a short braise with mushrooms and fortified wine. The same structure survives in modern quail and rabbit braises.
Small birds were standard cheap meat in Britain and much of Europe well into the nineteenth century. Larks reached London markets by the dozen from the Sussex downs and other lark-catching districts, often netted in autumn when flocks were dense, and appeared in pies, puddings and stews; "lark pie" is recorded on English tables and in cookery books for generations before Cassell's. The entry sits in this dictionary alongside other small game such as snipe and plover because a Victorian cook was expected to handle whatever the poulterer had. The trade eventually collapsed under falling bird numbers and changing opinion, in which bird-protection campaigners -- the Society for the Protection of Birds was founded in 1889, chiefly in opposition to the plumage trade -- played a part in the movement that led to legal protection for songbirds. A recipe like this one is best read as evidence of how much wild flesh a nineteenth-century kitchen consumed, and how quickly that stopped.