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Two Bay-leaves (Little Parsley)
A little Parsley.
Marjoram. Thyme. Salt. Six Truffles, chopped fine.
Three hard-boiled Eggs (yolks).
First bone the larks, being careful not to break them. Then cut the bacon into small pieces, put it in a sautépan with the shalot, garlic, and flavouring: let it fry until brown; add the liver cut in pieces, and cook over the fire until brown, but not too much cooked. Put the contents of the sautépan into a mortar and pound it, then pass it through a wire sieve, return again to the mortar, and add the yolks of egg. When well mixed, add the truffles , and stuff each lark to resemble it natural shape. Oil some paper cases, and put each lark in a case. Brush over with salad oil and put in the oven until they are just cooked.
Put the bones of the larks, half a pint of good stock, and one glass of Marsala, into a stewpan, and reduce it all to one gill. When the larks are cooked , put a spoonful of this sauce over each.
This is a late-Victorian entrée of boned larks, stuffed with a truffled liver farce and baked in paper cases. It cannot be reproduced today, and the points below explain where it fails as well as what the older terms mean.
- The birds are protectedThe skylark and its relatives are wild songbirds protected in Britain under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, and covered by the EU Birds Directive, though a few member states still permit limited traditional hunting; native larks are also protected in North America under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. In Britain, taking, killing, selling or possessing them is an offence and there is no lawful commercial supply.
- There is no legal market sourceNineteenth-century game dealers sold larks by the dozen, netted in autumn. Nothing equivalent is on sale in Britain now, and birds offered as larks should be treated with suspicion. If you want a dish of this type, work from a current recipe for farmed quail instead.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThe heading and opening lines are clearly fragmentary — the page begins mid-list with herbs and gives no quantity for the larks, the bacon, the shallot, the garlic or the liver. Even setting the birds aside, the recipe is not workable as printed.
- Liver farce, lightly cookedThe stuffing is liver browned "but not too much cooked", pounded, sieved and bound with hard-boiled yolk, then reheated inside the birds for an unspecified time. Since no time or temperature is given, there is no assurance the offal paste reaches a safe internal temperature; treat it as an underdone offal stuffing by modern standards.
- Archaic measuresA gill is a quarter of a pint — about 5 fl oz in British measure, so the half-pint of stock plus a glass of Marsala is reduced by roughly two-thirds. "Salad oil" means a bland table oil, in this period usually olive.
- Paper casesOiled paper moulds, of the kind called caisses in French kitchen usage; each bird was baked and served in its own case. "Just cooked" is the whole timing instruction given, which tells you how much the author assumed of a professional kitchen.
Small birds were standard high-table game in Britain and France through the nineteenth century: larks, ortolans, wheatears and thrushes appear in Francatelli, Gouffé and Escoffier alike, usually boned and stuffed, spitted, or baked en caisse as here. The combination of truffle, liver farce, Marsala and a reduction made from the carcasses is pure grande cuisine of the period — nothing is wasted, and the sauce is built from the bones of the very birds being served. Legal protection for songbirds came gradually, driven by the Victorian bird-protection movement and later by international migratory-bird agreements, and it is the reason recipes like this one now read as historical documents rather than instructions.