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Plovers' Eggs, Boiled
Boil in the same way as hen's eggs, allowing from eight to ten minutes; arrange them nicely, and, if served in a napkin, garnish with parsley. Serve brown bread and butter with them. Some people dislike the method of serving in a basket above mentioned; in which case a napkin, prettily folded, should be used.
The method is unremarkable; the ingredient is the problem. Plovers' eggs cannot legally be bought, sold or gathered in Britain and are protected across most of Europe.
- The bird is protected"Plovers' eggs" in Victorian and Edwardian usage meant chiefly the eggs of the northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), a species that has since declined steeply and is now legally protected. Taking the eggs of wild birds, and dealing in them, is prohibited under current British wildlife law and comparable legislation elsewhere in Europe.
- Commercial trade is closedThere is no lawful supply chain. Eggs offered as "plovers' eggs" in the past century were frequently black-headed gull eggs sold under the older name, and even that trade is now tightly licensed and seasonal. Nothing in a supermarket corresponds to what this recipe asks for.
- Wild eggs are not graded or tracedBeyond the legal question, eggs collected from open nests carry no lay date, no temperature history and no inspection. Shell contamination and unknown incubation stage are both real, and the recipe's eight-to-ten-minute boil does nothing about the latter.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for boiled small eggs from a lawful source. This entry is worth reading as a record of a vanished luxury, not as instructions.
- On the "basket above mentioned"The entry cross-refers to a preceding one that describes serving the eggs in a basket. The prettily folded napkin is offered here as the plainer alternative for those who disliked that method.
- Brown bread and butterNot a garnish but the intended accompaniment, the same service given to smoked salmon and potted meats in this period.
Plovers' eggs were one of the sharpest status foods of the late nineteenth-century English table: small, speckled, available only for a few weeks in spring, and priced accordingly. The first eggs of the season were a fixture of London club and hotel menus, and their arrival was reported in newspapers much as the first asparagus was. The eggs were gathered from lapwing nests on farmland and marsh, often by agricultural labourers who sold them on to dealers, and the birds' habit of laying replacement clutches was used to argue that collection did no harm. That argument looks doubtful now, though egg-taking was probably a secondary factor. Lapwing numbers fell through the twentieth century, attributed principally to farmland intensification, and British legislation progressively closed the trade: the Protection of Lapwings Act of 1928, the Protection of Birds Act 1954, and finally the legislation of 1981. That a general household dictionary carried a recipe for boiling them o less shows how routine the delicacy once seemed to the kind of household Cassell's was written for.