Home › The Principles of Cookery › Ortolans, Potted
Ortolans, Potted
Cut off the necks, heads, and legs of some ortolans, and season the birds with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Prepare some chicken force-meat--the quantity to be regulated by the size of the potting-pan and the number of ortolans. Spread a layer of forcemeat at the bottom of the pan, place an ortolan upon it, and then some more forcemeat, and continue until the pan is full, remembering only that the topmost layer should consist of forcemeat. Lay some thin slices of fat bacon on the top, put on the cover, and bake in a moderate oven. Two or three truffles finely minced, and spread upon the layers of forcemeat, are a great improvement to this dish. To be served cold. Time to bake, one hour. Probable cost, uncertain, ortolans being seldom offered for sale.
This one is a reading exercise rather than a cooking one: the central ingredient cannot legally be bought, hunted or served in Europe or North America.
- The bird itselfThe ortolan is the ortolan bunting, Emberiza hortulana, a small migratory songbird. It is protected under the EU Birds Directive and by national law in France, where trapping and sale are banned; the ortolan is not a North American bird, but native buntings and their relatives are protected there under migratory bird statutes, and import of protected species is restricted. There is no lawful commercial supply.
- Why no substitution is offeredThe recipe is built around a bird eaten whole, bones and all, in a single mouthful, and its interest lies entirely in that. Anyone wanting a potted game-bird dish should work from a current recipe using a legally sold species rather than adapt this one.
- Potting without a sealCassell's calls this potted, but nothing here preserves the dish: there is no clarified butter poured over to exclude air, no measured cure, and no stated cooling or storage. A pan of forcemeat and small birds held at room temperature for later cold serving is the kind of handling that was blamed for potted and preserved meat poisonings.
- "Moderate oven"No temperature is given; a moderate oven is conventionally read today as somewhere around 350F. An hour at that heat would be more than the birds alone need, and is presumably aimed at setting a deep pan of forcemeat through.
- ForcemeatChicken forcemeat of the period is raw chicken pounded to a paste with fat, breadcrumbs soaked in milk or stock, egg and seasoning. Here it serves as packing, filling the gaps between the birds.
- The potting-panThe recipe requires only a covered pan filled to the top, the last layer being forcemeat. The thin slices of fat bacon laid over it act chiefly as a barding layer, keeping the surface from drying.
- "Probable cost, uncertain"Cassell's normally gives a probable cost for its entries. The admission that ortolans were seldom offered for sale suggests the dish was already a curiosity for English readers when the book was compiled.
Ortolan eating was a French luxury with a long literary trail: the birds were netted on migration, kept in darkness and fattened on millet, then killed and cooked whole, and the whole ritual — the diner's head under a napkin — is traditional lore repeated far more often than it was documented. English cookery books of the nineteenth century carried such entries most likely because a comprehensive dictionary was expected to cover the entire French repertoire whether or not a reader could obtain the ingredients, and Cassell's own note that ortolans were rarely for sale shows the compilers knew it. The wider practice belongs to a period when small songbirds of many kinds — larks, thrushes, buntings — were ordinary market game across southern Europe. Populations fell sharply through the twentieth century, and the ortolan bunting became one of the emblematic cases for European bird protection law, which is why this recipe now reads as a record of a vanished trade rather than an instruction.