Roast Plover
Pluck a brace of plovers without drawing them, and wipe them well outside with a damp cloth. Truss them with the legs close to the body, and the feet pressing upon the thighs; bring the head round under the wing. Put them into a hot oven. Lay in the pan slice of toast, 1 slice for each bird, first moistening it in good gravy, and baste the plovers liberally. A few minutes before they are done dredge a little flour over them, and let them be nicely frothed. Serve upon the toast. A little melted butter may be sent to table in a tureen. Time to roast the birds, fifteen to twenty minutes. Sufficient for two persons.
This is a Victorian small-game roast of the kind that assumes a licensed shoot and a game dealer's counter. It cannot be reproduced legally or safely today, and the notes below explain the vocabulary and the specific problems rather than offering a way around them.
- The birds are protectedPlovers are protected in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. In the United Kingdom lapwing and most plover species are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, though golden plover remains a listed quarry species with a statutory open season. In practice there is no ordinary retail supply for a home cook; for a small-bird roast, use a current recipe written for farmed quail or squab.
- "Without drawing them"Drawing means gutting. Woodcock, snipe and plover were traditionally roasted whole with the intestines ("the trail") left in, to melt into the toast beneath. Roasting undrawn viscera for fifteen minutes leaves gut contents well below any temperature that would control Campylobacter or Salmonella, and the cavity contents insulate themselves.
- Fifteen to twenty minutesThat is a short roast even for a bird this small, and Victorian game cookery generally aimed at a breast still pink. Combined with an ungutted bird and wild-shot flesh, it leaves little or no margin by modern standards.
- "A brace"A brace is two birds. The yield line — sufficient for two persons — means one plover each, which tells you how small these birds are: a plover dresses out at roughly 4 to 6 oz.
- "Nicely frothed"Frothing was the standard Victorian finish for roast game: flour dredged over the hot bird and basted with fat so that it puffed and browned into a thin crisp skin.
- The toastThe slice of gravy-soaked toast under each bird was a serving vessel and a sauce at once, catching the drippings during roasting. It is the one element of the dish that transfers cleanly to any properly cooked small bird.
- Melted butter in a tureen"Melted butter" in nineteenth-century English cookery usually meant a thin flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply clarified butter. Sent separately, it stood in for gravy with birds too small to yield much of their own.
Plover was one of the small "trail" birds that English cookery treated as a delicacy precisely because it was not drawn — a category it shared with woodcock and snipe, and one that separated game cookery from poultry cookery entirely. Golden plover and lapwing were sold in London game markets through the nineteenth century, and lapwing eggs were a luxury item into the twentieth; the birds appear in general household compendia like this one because a middle-class kitchen was expected to know what to do with whatever a country connection sent down in a hamper. The Game sections of such books preserve a long list of species that later bird-protection law removed from the table, and the shift is itself the history: falling populations of waders, driven partly by egg-collecting and market shooting, led to the statutory protection that makes this page a document rather than an instruction.