Important: Safety Warning
This page describes collecting wild birds' eggs, shooting birds for specimens, or similar practices. These activities are now illegal under wildlife-protection laws, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and they contributed to the decline of the very species described.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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To Dress Reed Birds
Pick open and carefully wash one dozen or more birds. Place them between the folds of a towel, and with a rolling-pin mash the bones quite flat. Season with salt and a little cayenne and black pepper. Either fry or broil on a gridiron made for broiling oysters. This must be done over a clear fire. When done, season, put a lump of butter on each bird and serve hot.--Mrs. A. M. D. TO COOK SORA, ORTOLANS, AND OTHER SMALL BIRDS.
Prepare as you would a chicken for roasting. Lay in a pan and pour boiling water over them or, if convenient, steam them. Scaled a few large fresh oysters till just plump, season them with cayenne pepper, salt and butter. Pour into the cavity of each bird a few drops of pepper sauce and then put a large oyster in each. Broil a short time, frequently turning that they may not become dry. If not ready to serve them as soon as they are done, lay in a tin bucket, butter them and sprinkle them again with black pepper, cover the bucket and set it over boiling water till wanted. When laid in the dish, sift browned cracker over the birds, and pour gravy into the dish.--Mrs. T. To Cook Sora, Ortolans, and Other Small Birds.
After they are split open in the back and dressed, lay them in weak salt and water for a short time. Then lay them on a board and roll with a rolling-pin to flatten the breastbone. Put butter, pepper, and salt on them. Lay them on a gridiron and broil slowly. When just done, add more butter and pepper, lay in a flat tin bucket, which set over a vessel of boiling water to keep the birds hot, juicy, and tender till wanted.--Mrs. T.
SORA, ORTOLANS, ROBINS, AND OTHER SMALL BIRDS.
They should be carefully cleaned, buttered, sprinkled with pepper and salt, and broiled. When they are served, butter them again. If you like, serve each bird on a piece of toast, and pour over them a sauce of red wine, mushroom catsup, salt, cayenne pepper, and celery.
These four methods all depend on wild songbirds that cannot legally be taken, bought, or cooked in the United States or Europe today. The notes below explain the specific obstacles and decode the vocabulary for readers coming to the page as historians rather than cooks.
- Reed birds are bobolinks"Reed bird" was the market name for the bobolink, shot by the thousand in tidal rice and wild-rice marshes on the Atlantic flyway. The species is protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918; killing, possessing, or selling one is a federal offence.
- Robins and ortolansThe American robin is likewise fully protected under the same treaty, and was a common market bird before it. The ortolan is a European bunting; hunting it was banned in France in 1999 and the ban has since been enforced with prosecutions. Birds sold as "ortolan" in nineteenth-century America were often bobolinks, and sometimes rails, under a fashionable French name.
- SoraThe sora rail is the one bird here that remains a legal game species in parts of North America, under licence, season, and bag limit. It cannot be bought, and the other birds in the same recipe cannot be taken at all, so the recipe as printed has no lawful form.
- If you want the dishA current recipe for farmed quail or squab from a licensed supplier is the place to look. This page is worth reading as a record, not as a set of instructions.
- "Pick open"To pluck and open (draw) the bird; for birds this small, plucking was generally done dry rather than by scalding, which tears the thin skin. The approach assumes birds small enough that the carcass can be crushed flat with a rolling pin.
- A clear fireHardwood or charcoal burned down past the smoke to steady red embers with no flame. Fat dripping from a small bird onto a flaring fire tastes of soot, hence the insistence.
- The gridiron and the tin bucketAn oyster gridiron had bars set close together so small items would not fall through. The "flat tin bucket" set over boiling water is a covered bain-marie, a period holding cabinet for keeping broiled things hot without further cooking.
- Mushroom catsup and browned crackerMushroom catsup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice extract, closer to Worcestershire than to tomato ketchup; it survives in Britain as mushroom ketchup. "Browned cracker" is dried cracker toasted and crushed, the period equivalent of dry breadcrumbs.
Marsh-bird shooting was a fixture of late-summer and autumn sport on the Chesapeake and the tidal rivers of Virginia and the Carolinas, and the birds reached city markets by the dozen and the barrel; reed birds are said to have appeared on the bills of fare of eastern city restaurants in season. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878 from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, records that traffic as an ordinary domestic matter, which is why the page gathers several nearly identical instructions from only two named correspondents — M.rs. T., who supplies two of them, and one other — plus one unsigned method. The recipes tell you two things about the period: that small birds were cheap enough to be treated casually, and that oysters were cheaper still, since one is used here merely as stuffing for a bird the size of a thumb. Market hunting on this scale is what prompted the Lacey Act of 1900 and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, the legislation that makes these pages unreproducible.