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Small Birds, Fried
When the birds cannot conveniently be broiled, they may be fried as follows. Pluck the birds carefully, split them open, and flatten them; sprinkle salt and pepper upon them, and roll them in bread-raspings. Dissolve a small slice of fresh butter in a frying-pan; when it is hot, lay the birds in it, and fry them nicely. Put them on a hot dish. Add a table-spoonful of boiling water to the gravy in the pan, let it boil up once, strain it into the dish, and serve very hot.
The cooking here is sound and unremarkable — the problem is the main ingredient. "Small birds" in a British book of this date means larks, thrushes, blackbirds, wheatears, sparrows and the like, taken by net, lime or gun in quantity. Nearly all of them are now protected.
- The birds themselvesUnder the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 in the UK, and comparable law across the EU and the United States (the Migratory Bird Treaty Act), it is an offence to kill, take, sell or possess the songbirds this recipe assumes. Lark, thrush and wheatear are not obtainable and cannot lawfully be shot or trapped for the table.
- Not a matter of techniqueNothing in the method is dangerous — split, seasoned, crumbed and fried in butter is a perfectly ordinary treatment. The recipe fails on legality and conservation, not on food safety, and no adjustment to it makes the ingredient available.
- If you want the dishFarmed quail and squab are sold legally and are cooked in much this way. Use a current recipe written for them rather than scaling this one.
- Bread-raspingsNot fresh crumbs. Raspings were the hard outer crust of a stale loaf grated or rasped to a coarse dry powder — a Victorian kitchen kept a jar of them. Dry unseasoned breadcrumbs are the nearest thing.
- What is left outThe recipe says pluck and split but not draw. Very small game birds were often cooked with the trail left in, and that may be the expectation sitting behind the silence; the recipe itself does not say.
- "Fry them nicely"A characteristic evasion. The book assumes a cook who can judge a small flat bird in butter by colour and smell, and gives no time at all.
- The pan gravyA single tablespoon of boiling water swirled into the butter and browned crumbs is a deglaze in miniature — the whole sauce for the dish. Straining it was to keep loose raspings out of the serving dish.
Eating small birds was ordinary in Britain and across Europe well into the twentieth century, and the book treats it as unremarkable — frying is offered merely as a convenience "when the birds cannot conveniently be broiled". Larks in particular were a commercial trade: they were netted in numbers on the downs and open fields and sold by the dozen in city markets, Leadenhall among them, with Continental cities doing the same on a larger scale. The birds were cheap protein and a cheap luxury at once, small enough that a helping meant several apiece. Successive protection laws through the twentieth century closed the trade almost entirely; the practice survives legally only in a few tightly regulated pockets of southern Europe. Recipes like this one are now read as evidence of what a Victorian market stall held rather than as anything a cook can act on.