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Plovers' Eggs, Bouchees Of
Boil five or six eggs hard. When cold, cut them through lengthwise; mask the outsides with a little nicely-flavoured forcemeat. Make this quite smooth, then dip in a rich batter, and fry in boiling fat to a golden brown. File in a serviette, and garnish with fried parsley.
The method is straightforward Victorian frying, but the central ingredient cannot legally be obtained in Britain or most of Europe today.
- The eggs are the problemPlovers' eggs here means the eggs of the northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), a bird whose population has fallen sharply and which is protected in the United Kingdom under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and across the EU under the Birds Directive. Taking, possessing or selling the eggs of wild lapwings and other plovers is an offence; five or six of them is not a shopping list any longer but a wildlife crime.
- Not a loopholeThere is no farmed or licensed supply of wild plovers' eggs. Anything sold under the name in the present day is either another species entirely or illegally taken. If the idea appeals, work from a current recipe using a legally farmed egg.
- Bouchées, in the older senseNo pastry cases are involved. Cassell's is using bouchée in its literal sense of a mouthful — a small hot savoury eaten in one bite, of the kind sent up as a savoury course or with drinks.
- ForcemeatA seasoned pounded mixture of meat, fish or poultry bound with breadcrumbs, egg or butter, made smooth enough to spread as a coating. Nothing sold today under that name corresponds exactly.
- ServietteA folded table napkin laid in the serving dish, on which fried food was piled to absorb fat.
Plovers' eggs were one of the sharpest seasonal luxuries of the Victorian and Edwardian table, appearing in London poulterers' windows in early spring at prices per egg rather than per dozen, and much of the supply came by boat from the Netherlands as well as from the East Anglian fens, where egg-gathering was a recognised country trade. They were served plainly — boiled, cooled, and eaten from a napkin with celery salt — which is why a recipe that masks them in forcemeat and batter reads as an attempt to do something novel with an ingredient every fashionable kitchen already knew. Their appearance in a general household dictionary of the period says more about aspiration than about what most readers cooked; within a few decades of this book, Parliament had legislated on the matter in the Protection of Lapwings Act 1928, though the bird's long decline is generally attributed chiefly to agricultural change rather than to collecting, and the dish largely faded from the repertoire.