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Ortolans, Roasted
Truss the ortolans without drawing them. Lay first a vine-leaf and then a thin slice of bacon over the breast of each, and tie the leaf and bacon on with string. Put the birds down to a brisk fire, and baste them liberally. Dish upon toast which has been placed under them whilst they were roasting, and garnish the dish with water-cress. Send orange-flavoured gravy to table in a tureen. Time, twenty-five minutes to roast. Probable cost, uncertain, ortolans being seldom offered for sale. Sufficient, half a dozen for six persons.
This is a recipe for a bird that can no longer legally be bought, sold, trapped or eaten across its range. The notes below explain why, and cover the archaic terms for readers working through the rest of Cassell's game chapters.
- The bird is protectedThe ortolan is the ortolan bunting, Emberiza hortulana, a small migratory songbird. It has been protected across Europe since the EU Birds Directive of 1979, with France — the last country where the trade persisted openly — banning capture and sale in 1999. Trapping, possessing and selling the birds is a criminal offence, and populations have declined steeply.
- No substitute is intended hereQuail, small poussins and other farmed birds are sometimes offered as stand-ins, but the point of the dish was the whole ungutted songbird eaten in one or two mouthfuls. Anyone wanting roast quail or barded small game should work from a current recipe rather than adapt this one.
- "Without drawing them"The birds were roasted entire, viscera included, which is central to why the dish existed and also why it sits outside any modern food-handling practice. Cassell's takes this for granted; nearly all game birds are drawn today, woodcock and snipe being the surviving exceptions.
- "Probable cost, uncertain"Cassell's own note that ortolans were "seldom offered for sale" tells you they were a rarity on the British market, priced beyond the compilers' ability to quote.
- "A brisk fire"In this book that means a spit or bird-roaster set close to a strong open fire, a fierce heat rather than a moderate one. Twenty-five minutes reflects a spit turning at a distance, not a modern enclosed oven.
- Barding with vine leaf and baconThe technique itself is sound and appears throughout Victorian small-game cookery: the leaf shields the skin, the bacon supplies fat that a lean wild bird lacks, and the toast beneath catches the drippings. It transfers happily to farmed quail in a modern recipe.
- Orange-flavoured gravyA game gravy flavoured with orange, sent separately in a tureen rather than poured over.
The ortolan bunting was for centuries a byword for luxury in French and Italian cookery: birds were netted on migration, kept in darkness to make them gorge, fattened on millet, and then — by the tradition usually attached to the dish in Gascony — drowned in Armagnac and eaten whole, bones and all, sometimes under a napkin. Cassell's includes it because a late-Victorian dictionary of cookery aimed at completeness, and English tables of the period still saw occasional imported ortolans alongside larks, wheatears and other small birds now unthinkable as food; the compilers' admission that the cost is "uncertain, ortolans being seldom offered for sale" is itself a record of how marginal the trade already was in Britain. The barding with a vine leaf and bacon, and the toast set beneath to catch the fat, are the standard treatment given in this book to any small lean bird. What has changed is not the technique but the bird: sustained decline through the twentieth century, variously attributed to trapping, agricultural intensification and habitat loss, moved the ortolan from delicacy to protected species, and the recipe now reads as a historical document rather than an instruction.