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Plovers, Pie Of
Pluck, draw, and skin three plovers, and truss them as for roasting. Lay at the bottom of a moderate-sized pie-dish half a pound of rump steak, cut into convenient-sized pieces, and season these rather highly with pepper and salt. Lay the birds upon them, and beside each bird place the yolk of a hard-boiled egg. Clean a dozen moderate-sized mushrooms, cut the stalks off, and lay them at the top of the pie. Pour in half a pint of good brown gravy. Line the edges of the dish with puff-paste, cover it with the same, ornament prettily, make a hole in the top, and bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake the pie, about an hour and a half. Sufficient for five or six persons.
The problem here is not technique but the bird. Plovers cannot legally or ethically be taken for the table in Britain, Europe or North America, and no part of this recipe can be followed as printed.
- The birds are protectedThe plovers of Victorian game dealing were chiefly the golden plover and the lapwing ("green plover"). All wild birds are protected in principle under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and lapwing populations have collapsed far enough that the species is red-listed; killing, taking or selling lapwings is an offence. Golden plover, by contrast, still appears in the Act's schedules as a quarry species with an open season.
- North America is no more permissiveAmerican plovers and the related Eskimo curlew were shot for market in the nineteenth century to the point of near or total extinction. All are now covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes possession of the birds, their parts or their eggs unlawful.
- Nor the eggsPlovers' eggs were a luxury of the same era and appear elsewhere in books of this period. Collecting wild birds' eggs is separately prohibited, and the hard-boiled yolks here should not be read as an invitation to source them.
- Substitution is not a fixDropping in quail or pigeon will not reproduce the dish: the hour and a half and the seasoned rump steak beneath suit small, dark, strongly flavoured wading birds. If you want a game pie, work from a current recipe written for the bird you actually have.
Plover was standard game-shop stock in late nineteenth-century Britain, sold by the brace alongside snipe, woodcock and larks, and Cassell's treats it as unremarkably as it treats rabbit. Golden plover and lapwing were netted and shot in large numbers for city markets, and lapwing eggs commanded high prices at the start of the season; the fashion for them is generally traced to the same appetite for small wild birds that filled the era's cookbooks with recipes for ortolans and wheatears. That trade is the reason for the modern protections: the Protection of Lapwings Act 1928 in Britain restricted egg-taking, and the broader statutes of the twentieth century curtailed the trade, though golden plover remains a quarry species that may lawfully be sold dead in season in Great Britain. A recipe like this one now reads less as instruction than as evidence of what Victorian shooting and market-gunning did to Europe's and North America's shorebirds.