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Plover, Golden, Roasted
Truss like woodcock, and roast before a brisk fire. Put a slice of toasted bread about half an inch thick under the birds, and baste constantly with butter until sufficiently cooked. Serve the plovers on the toast, which should be well saturated with the basting and the trail. Pour some good gravy over them in the dish (see GRAVY FOR GAME). Time, about a quarter of an hour to roast. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. per brace. Sufficient, a brace for two persons.
This is a straightforward spit-roast of a small wader, but the bird itself is the problem: golden plover cannot lawfully be taken or sold for the table in Britain, Ireland, most of Europe or North America.
- Protected speciesLegal status -- The European golden plover (Pluvialis apricaria) is still a quarry species in Britain and Ireland, with a defined open season and limited lawful sale of dead birds in season, and is listed as huntable under the EU Birds Directive; it is not, however, a routine article of commerce as Cassell's assumes. The American golden plover is protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in the United States and Canada, where killing, selling or possessing it for food is an offence.
- The trailLike woodcock and snipe, plover were cooked undrawn, so that the intestines melted onto the toast beneath. That practice depends on a wild bird shot and hung under conditions no modern kitchen can verify, and it is the part of the method that cannot simply be transferred to another bird.
- "Truss like woodcock"For small game birds this meant skewering the bird with its own long beak through the thighs, legs folded back, rather than tying with string. The head was left on and the eyes removed.
- "A brisk fire"An open roasting fire in front of which the bird turned on a spit or bottle-jack, with the toast set beneath to catch the butter and trail. A quarter of an hour at that heat would leave the flesh pink.
- Gravy for gameThe cross-reference is to a separate recipe elsewhere in the book for a stock-based gravy made from game trimmings.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a legally sold farmed bird, such as quail or squab, from a source that gives proper handling and cooking temperatures.
Cassell's belongs to a generation of British cookbooks that treated small wild waders as ordinary market game. Golden plover, along with lapwing, snipe and woodcock, were sold by the brace in Victorian game shops and prized for dark, faintly livery flesh; plovers' eggs were an even greater luxury, sold in the spring to London clubs and hotels. The convention of roasting them undrawn on toast, so the toast absorbed the "trail", was shared across the whole class of long-billed birds. That open market narrowed piecemeal across the twentieth century as breeding numbers fell and protective legislation accumulated -- lapwing and the egg trade in particular were closed off -- so that a dish once costing half a crown a brace now depends on a supply chain that no longer functions in the way the book assumes.