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Wheatears
These birds are in season from July to October. They should be cooked the day on which they are killed. Carefully pick and draw the birds, truss them like larks, put them on a bird-spit, or pass a long skewer from one bird to the other, and put the roasting-hook between them that they may hang side by side. Flour them, put them down to a clear fire, and baste plentifully with butter. When done, dish them upon fried bread, and garnish the dish with sliced lemon. Send bread sauce to table with them. Many cooks brush them over with yolk of egg and sprinkle bread-crumbs upon them before putting them down to the fire. Time to roast the wheatears, about ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, uncertain, wheatears being seldom offered for sale.
This is a recipe for a small wild songbird that can no longer legally be taken, sold or eaten in Britain, Europe or North America. The notes below explain the obstacles rather than how to get around them.
- The bird is protectedThe wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe) is a wild migratory passerine protected in the UK under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, across Europe under the Birds Directive, and in the United States and Canada under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Killing, trapping, possessing or selling one is an offence, and no exemption exists for the table.
- Trapping is the real problemWheatears were taken chiefly in turf traps or nets rather than by gun, and in large numbers. Any attempt to follow the recipe means an illegal take, not simply an unusual purchase.
- Cassell's own note is the tell"Probable cost, uncertain, wheatears being seldom offered for sale" shows the bird was not a regular market item, and that even a comprehensive dictionary of cookery could not quote a price for it.
- Eaten undrawn in some traditionsCassell's says to draw the birds, but small birds of this kind were sometimes cooked whole with the viscera left in, which carries an obvious contamination risk on top of everything else. The instruction here is the more careful of the two customs.
- The equipment is gone as wellA bird-spit and roasting-hook hung the birds vertically before an open fire so the butter ran down them continuously. Nothing in a modern kitchen reproduces the radiant heat and constant basting that made ten to fifteen minutes sufficient for a bird weighing under an ounce.
- If you want the dishFarmed quail is the usual stand-in for small roasted game birds, but it needs a current recipe with its own times and temperatures rather than these.
Wheatears were once a Sussex speciality, trapped in their thousands on the South Downs each late summer as the birds gathered before their migration to Africa. Shepherds cut small T-shaped turf traps into the turf and set horsehair nooses inside; the birds, which dart for cover at the shadow of a passing cloud or hawk, ran in of their own accord. The catch was sold to inns and hotels at Eastbourne and Brighton, where wheatears were served as a delicacy and often called the "English ortolan." Recorded catches ran to tens of thousands a year in the early nineteenth century, and the trade was in decline by the time this entry was written, undone by a combination of over-trapping and the ploughing and enclosure of downland. The recipe survives in Cassell's as a fossil of that trade: a set of instructions for a food that its own compilers admitted could hardly be bought.