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Puffs of Larks
Make half a pound of puff-paste, according to the recipe already given. Pluck and draw three or four larks, and brown them equally all over in a stewpan with a little butter. Take them up, drain them, and put into the body of each bird a small lump of fresh butter, one or two bearded oysters, a little pepper and salt, and a table-spoonful of thick cream. Truss each lark firmly, and wrap it in slices of fat bacon. Cover it with the puff-paste, rolled out to the thickness of a quarter of an inch, and shape it as neatly as possible. Put the puffs side by side on a buttered tin, and bake in a brisk oven for about ten minutes. Probable cost of larks, 1s. 6d. per dozen. Sufficient, four or five for a dish.
This is a Victorian small-game dish built around a bird that can no longer legally be taken or sold in Britain, Europe or North America. The notes below explain the terms and why the method does not translate.
- The birdsSkylarks and their relatives are protected under the UK Wildlife and Countryside Act, EU birds legislation and, in North America, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Taking, killing or selling them is an offence, and there is no lawful supply.
- Cooking time and temperatureThe book gives no oven temperatures; "brisk oven" simply means a hot one, conventionally rendered nowadays as something in the region of 425-450F. Ten minutes at that heat will set and colour puff paste, but it is unlikely to bring the interior of a stuffed bird to a safe temperature; the pastry, bacon and cream all insulate it further.
- What is sealed insideEach bird encloses uncooked oysters and a tablespoon of cream inside a poultry cavity, then wraps the lot in fat bacon and pastry. Uncooked shellfish and undercooked bird flesh, insulated inside bacon and pastry for only ten minutes, is the combination that makes this unworkable rather than merely rustic.
- "Bearded" oystersThe beard is the dark frill of gill tissue around the oyster's edge, trimmed away before use. The instruction assumes shucked oysters, which here receive only the little heat that penetrates the bacon and pastry in ten minutes.
- Puff-paste quantityHalf a pound of pastry for the three or four birds the method describes is roughly two ounces each, rolled a quarter-inch thick - thicker than most modern puff pastry work.
- The cost note1s. 6d. per dozen places this in a period when larks were an ordinary market commodity sold by the dozen from London and provincial poulterers. The price is a useful dating clue and nothing more.
- If you want the ideaFarmed quail and squab are sold legally and are the usual modern stand-ins for small game birds, but use a current recipe with proper roasting times rather than adapting the timings above.
Small birds by the dozen were a staple of English and continental cookery well into the nineteenth century, and Cassell's treats larks as unremarkably as it treats pigeons - the price note, given per dozen, tells you they arrived at market in quantity, often netted in autumn on downland and shipped to city poulterers. The device here, a bird enriched with butter, oysters and cream, jacketed in bacon and baked inside pastry, belongs to the same family of thinking as steak and oyster pudding or the older "lark pie": oysters had for much of the century been cheap enough to bulk and season meat rather than to serve as a luxury, though by the date of this book depleted beds had begun to push prices up. The dish's disappearance is usually attributed less to taste than to law and numbers. Large-scale trapping of songbirds drew sustained objection through the later Victorian period, and successive protection acts in Britain and, later, international migratory bird treaties are generally credited with bringing the trade to an end, leaving recipes like this one as a record of a food supply that no longer exists.