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Ortolans on Toast
Truss some ortolans in the same manner as woodcock (see WOODCOCK, TRUSSED), lay them on toast, and bake in a fairly hot oven for twenty-five minutes. Dish up on the toast, and serve with good brown gravy that has had the juice of an orange squeezed in.
This is a recipe for a bird that can no longer legally be bought, sold, hunted or served across Europe, and the whole dish rests on that one ingredient.
- The bird is protectedThe ortolan is the ortolan bunting, Emberiza hortulana, a small migratory songbird. It has been protected under European law since the 1979 Birds Directive, and France — where the trade persisted most openly — moved against it in the late 1990s, under pressure from the Commission. Capture, sale and service are all offences, and populations have continued to decline.
- Not a supply problem but a legal oneNo poulterer, importer or game dealer can supply ortolans. There is no permitted source, so the recipe has no lawful starting point rather than merely an inconvenient one.
- Why the trapping matteredThe classical preparation depended on netting birds on migration and fattening them in darkness for weeks before killing them, often by drowning in spirit. That process, not just the shooting, is what conservation and animal-welfare law has closed off. It cannot be reproduced from anything on sale.
- "Trussed as woodcock"The recipe simply refers the reader to Cassell's own woodcock entry. In period game cookery small birds of this kind were commonly left undrawn, the trail cooked inside the body and eaten on the toast beneath. Either way it is a technique for wild-shot birds, not a method to transfer to farmed poultry.
- The toast is structuralIn this family of recipes the bread sits under the bird to catch the fat and the juices from inside it, and is served as part of the dish. That is what makes the recipe legible as game cookery rather than a roast with a garnish.
- If you want the flavour ideaBrown gravy sharpened with orange juice is a sound eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pairing for small dark-fleshed game. Use a current recipe for a legally sold bird such as quail or squab; do not attempt to adapt the instructions above.
Ortolans were a notorious luxury of the European table, eaten whole and traditionally under a napkin — a piece of ritual usually explained as a way of holding in the aroma, and sometimes said to conceal the diner from God, though that gloss is folklore rather than documented practice. They reached British kitchens preserved in fat or shipped from France and Italy, and Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery treats them as it treats larks, plovers and wheatears: one more small bird in a long alphabetical run, dispatched in two sentences because an Edwardian cook was assumed to know what to do with anything feathered. The casualness is the point. A book like this records a period in which songbirds were an ordinary market commodity, and the brevity of the entry shows how little justification that needed. The same appetite is why the ortolan is now a protected species and this recipe a historical document.