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The Bones of the Larks
A few drops of Lemon-juice.
Boil the brown sauce, tomato sauce, sherry, and bones of the larks all together until reduced to half a pint; add a few drops of lemon-juice, strain through a tammy-cloth and pour over and round the larks.
This is the closing paragraph of a larger lark entrée: the birds are cooked elsewhere in the original recipe and this passage makes the sauce from their carcasses. It cannot be followed today because of the bird itself, not the cookery.
- Larks are protectedSkylarks and their relatives are protected in the United Kingdom under wildlife legislation and across the EU under the Birds Directive, though a few member states still permit limited hunting under derogation; in the United States native songbirds are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. In Britain and the US, taking, killing, selling or possessing them is an offence and there is no legal retail supply of lark carcasses or lark bones. Anyone wanting a small-game entrée should work from a current recipe using a legally sold bird.
- An incomplete recipeThe text as printed begins mid-thought with "A few drops of Lemon-juice" — it is the tail end of a longer entry, and the quantities of brown sauce, tomato sauce and sherry appear in the omitted portion. There is no way to reconstruct the proportions from this page alone.
- "Brown sauce" in this bookNot the bottled condiment. In a high-class kitchen of this period it means espagnole: a brown roux moistened with strong veal or game stock, simmered and skimmed for hours. Tomato sauce likewise means a cooked, sieved sauce, not ketchup.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml, rather than the 8 fl oz American measure. The instruction is a reduction target, so the finishing point is judged by volume and body rather than by time.
- Tammy-clothA loosely woven woollen straining cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois or a double layer of muslin does the same work in a modern kitchen.
- Why the bones go inThe carcasses are there purely as a flavour and gelatine extraction — the same logic as a jus made from roast bones. The lemon juice comes in at the end, after the reduction, as a corrective for the sweetness of the sherry and tomato.
Small birds served whole were a fixture of grand European cookery well into the twentieth century: larks, ortolans, wheatears and thrushes appear in Victorian and Edwardian menus by the dozen, sold in markets by the string and often baked in pies or set on croûtons as an entrée between the fish and the roast. The instruction to simmer the picked carcasses back into the sauce is characteristic of the professional kitchens this book was written for, where nothing carrying flavour was discarded and a garnish's own bones were expected to enrich its sauce. The practice collapsed in the twentieth century as songbird populations fell and bird-protection law caught up with the table — the ortolan ban in France is the best-known instance — which is why a page like this now reads as a document of the period rather than a set of directions.