Important: Safety Warning
This page describes collecting wild birds' eggs, shooting birds for specimens, or similar practices. These activities are now illegal under wildlife-protection laws, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and they contributed to the decline of the very species described.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Plovers, Stewed
Pluck and draw a brace of plovers. Mince the trail, and mix with it two ounces of finely-shredded beef suet, four roasted chestnuts pounded, the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, and two artichoke bottoms boiled and minced; mix these ingredients thoroughly, and season rather highly with pepper and salt. Fill the birds with the forcemeat, and truss them as if for roasting. Put them side by side in a stewpan just large enough to hold them, pour over them three-quarters of a pint of good brown gravy, and add a glass of port or claret, a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, three or four mushrooms, or, failing the latter, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and a little pepper and salt if required. Cover the saucepan closely, and stew gently for half an hour. Take up the birds, and put them in a hot dish. Strain the gravy, and thicken it with a dessert-spoonful of brown thickening. If this is not at hand, a little may be made by mixing equal proportions of flour and butter, and stirring the paste quickly over a gentle fire for three minutes, then putting it into the sauce, and boiling it until smooth. Pour the gravy round the birds, and garnish the dish with plovers' eggs boiled hard, shelled, cut into quarters, and placed round it. Time to stew, half an hour. Probable cost, plovers, 2s. 6d. per brace. Sufficient for two or three persons.
This is a Victorian game recipe built on two things a modern cook cannot lawfully obtain: wild plovers and wild plovers' eggs. The notes below explain the obstacles and gloss the period vocabulary rather than adapting the method.
- The birds themselvesPlovers are protected in North America under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. In Britain all wild birds are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981; the lapwing may not be shot, though the golden plover is still technically a listed quarry species with an open season. Historic market shooting and egg-gathering are among the pressures usually cited in the long decline of lapwing numbers, alongside changes in farming.
- The garnish of eggsPlovers' eggs were a luxury trade in the nineteenth century, gathered by the thousand from nesting grounds. Collecting or selling wild birds' eggs is now illegal in both jurisdictions, and no substitute is being offered here — if you want a stewed game bird, work from a current recipe for farmed guinea fowl, quail or pigeon.
- "The trail"The entrails of small game birds, minced and eaten as a delicacy; snipe and woodcock were commonly cooked undrawn for this reason. Here the birds are drawn first and the trail worked into the forcemeat. Either way, cooking the intestines sits outside modern food-safety handling for any bird, farmed or wild.
- A braceTwo birds, sold and cooked as a pair. The recipe reckons them sufficient for two or three people.
- Brown thickeningA cooked flour-and-butter paste, what a modern kitchen calls a brown roux or, uncooked, beurre manié. Cassell's assumed a jar of it stood ready in the larder, which is why the fallback instruction is given almost as an afterthought.
- Mushroom ketchupNot the tomato condiment but a thin, dark, salted mushroom liquor used as a savoury seasoning. It is still made commercially and is closer to a light soy or Worcestershire in function than to anything ketchup-shaped.
- Artichoke bottomsThe trimmed fleshy base of the globe artichoke, here boiled and minced into the forcemeat.
- The price noteTwo shillings and sixpence a brace, half a crown, was a substantial sum for a household of the period, and the fact that a price is quoted at all indicates the birds were expected to be bought from a poulterer.
Cassell's belongs to the last decades in which wild waders were ordinary commercial poultry. Plovers, snipe, woodcock and lapwings hung in London poulterers' windows through the autumn and winter, and their eggs — pale, blotched, sold in moss-lined boxes — were a spring delicacy served hard-boiled at dinners and in club dining rooms. The port or claret, the brown gravy and the roux finish place the dish squarely in the Anglo-French repertoire that Victorian household manuals borrowed wholesale from professional kitchens. What the recipe records incidentally is scale: a book aimed at middle-class households could assume a brace of wild plovers was buyable for half a crown. Sustained pressure of that kind, on nesting grounds as much as on the birds, is often said to lie behind the protection both the birds and their eggs now enjoy across Europe and North America.