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.
Larks
What is the use of laughing at the French because they eat redbreasts, blackbirds, thrushes, the humble chaffinch, and the familiar sparrow? Do we not eat skylarks, fieldfares, and wheatears in plenty? A great number of larks are sent to London from Cambridge; but the chief supply for now 200 years appears to come from Dunstable. Why Dunstable? Is there any mysterious connection between larks and straw hats? Why must we go to Bedfordshire for a lark? Is it there and there only that the sky falls? Wherever the sky falls and these birds are caught, the physician of Queen Anne, Dr. Lister, like his royal mistress a great gastronomer, judged of their goodness by their weight. He laid down the rule, which has ever since been held sound, that twelve larks should weigh thirteen ounces, and that if below that weight they are not good.
Roast Larks. - There is a difference between the French and the English way-but both agree in taking out only Laver the gizzard. The French put the larks on a little larkspit, which, running from side to side, pins on them at the same time bards of bacon. The larks are then roasted briskly for eight or ten minutes, and served upon toast. The English season the larks with chopped parsley, pepper, salt, and nutmeg, rub them with yolk of egg, roll them in breadcrumbs, sprinkle them with oiled butter, roll them in crumbs again, run them on a larkspit, roast them for fifteen minutes before a bright fire, basting them with butter, and serve them with plenty of fried breadcrumbs. Lark Pudding or Pie. -For the perfection of a lark pudding, go to the Cheshire Cheese, in Fleet Street, and and ask for one. The contents of either pudding or pie are the same. Take the gizzards out of two dozen larks, and fry them lightly. Then put them into the pie dish or the pudding bowl, with a pound of veal and another pound of ham cut into small collops, seasoned with chopped parsley, shalot, mushrooms, pepper, and salt-which are first, however, to be boiled for a minute or two in a tumberful of broth and with a tablespoonful of flour. Bake the pie or boil the pudding for an hour and a quarter.
This entry is a record of a nineteenth-century London taste that the law has since closed off. The birds it calls for cannot lawfully be taken, sold or eaten in Britain or across most of Europe, and the preparation itself assumes practices no modern kitchen follows.
- The birds are protectedThe skylark, fieldfare and wheatear named here, and the redbreast, blackbird, thrush, chaffinch and sparrow of the opening paragraph, are protected wild birds under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. Killing, taking, selling or offering them for sale is a criminal offence. Most are also protected on the Continent under the EU Birds Directive, though the skylark remains huntable in some member states under national derogations. Skylark numbers in Britain fell steeply through the twentieth century, a decline usually attributed to the loss of mixed arable farming.
- Two dozen larks is not a small orderThe pudding calls for twenty-four birds for a single dish, and the text describes a great number of larks being sent to London from Cambridge, with the chief supply coming from Dunstable. Commercial netting on that scale is precisely what the legislation was written to stop, and no licence exists that would permit it for the table.
- "Taking out only the gizzard"Small game birds were traditionally cooked with the intestines and other viscera left inside, the trail regarded as the best part. Beyond the legal position, cooking a whole bird with the gut in place carries an obvious contamination risk that has no place in a modern kitchen.
- The larkspitA larkspit was a thin skewer run sideways through a row of birds and set before an open fire, not in an oven. The English direction is to roast for fifteen minutes "before a bright fire", basting; the eight-to-ten-minute French roast assumes the same fierce radiant heat, a method that has no direct equivalent in a domestic oven.
- If you want the puddingThe veal-and-ham, shallot and mushroom framework of the Cheshire Cheese pudding survives in plenty of current British steak-and-kidney and veal-and-ham pudding recipes. Use one of those; do not attempt to adapt this entry.
- Dr Lister's rule"Twelve larks should weigh thirteen ounces" is a little over an ounce a bird, roughly 30 g. It is quoted here only to show how the trade graded its stock; it is of no practical use now.
Kettner's entry catches the very end of a trade that had run for generations. Larks were netted in quantity on the Bedfordshire chalk around Dunstable and sent by the hamper to the London markets, where "Dunstable larks" were a recognised luxury from the seventeenth century onward; the town's other famous trade, straw-plaiting for hats, is the joke behind the author's mock-puzzled question. Dr Martin Lister, physician to Queen Anne and a naturalist of some standing, is credited with the twelve-to-thirteen-ounces rule, which the recipe says has ever since been held sound. The defensive opening hings birbirds when we do the same — is here unusually well earned. The Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street, still standing, was celebrated for its lark pudding, a vast suet-crusted thing brought steaming to the table in season; the house eventually dropped the larks and kept the pudding. Britain gave the birds legal protection in stages beginning with the Wild Birds Protection Acts of 1880 onward, and the dish went with them.