Larks, Roast
INGREDIENTS. - Larks, egg and bread-crumbs, fresh butter.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d. to 28. per dozen.
LEAMINGTON SAUCE.
These birds are by many persons esteemed a great delicacy and may be either roasted or broiled. Pick, gut and clean them; when they are trussed, brush them over with the yolk of an egg; sprinkle with bread-crumbs and roast them before a quick fire; baste them continually with fresh butter and keep sprinkling with the breadcrumbs until the birds are well covered. Dish them on bread-crumbs fried in clarified butter and garnish the dish with slices of lemon. Broiled larks are also very excellent: they should be cooked over a ROAST LARKS. clear fire, and would take about 10 minutes or 1/4 hour.
TIME.-1 hour to roast; 10 minutes to broil. ber.
SEASONABLE. In full season in Novem- Note.-Larks may also be plainly roasted, without covering them with egg and bread crumbs; they should be dished on fried crumbs.
Larks in Onions. (Italian Recipe.) -INGREDIENTS for dish for 5 or 6 persons. -8 larks, 4 Spanish onions of equal size, 3 thin slices of bacon, pint of stock, a fowl's liver, a bunch of herbs, lb. of veal forcemeat, pepper and salt. AVERAGE COST, 38. Clean and bone the larks, then stuff them with the liver and herbs chopped very fine.
Put the bacon at the bottom of a stewpan and upon it the larks; just cover with stock and simmer for about 1/4 hour. Peel and blanch the onions, cut them in half and take out enough from each to make room for a lark and a little forcemeat. Put a little in each 1/2 onion, then a lark, putting on the head (from which the eyes should be removed) with a little forcemeat, then cover with buttered paper and bake long enough to set the stuffing. Lift out with care, and having drained off the fat, glaze and serve with Spanish sauce.
TIME.- hour.
SEASONABLE in autumn.
Leamington Sauce. (An excellent Sauce for Flavouring Gravies, Hashes, Soups, &c.) (AUTHOR'S Recipe). INGREDIENTS. Walnuts. To each quart of walnut-juice, allow 2 quarts of vinegar, 1 pint of Indian soy, 1 oz. of cayenne, 2 oz. of shalots, & oz. of garlic, pint of port wine.
LEEK SOUP.
Be very particular in choosing the walnuts as soon as they appear in the market; for they are more easily bruised before they become hard and shelled. Pound them in & mortar to a pulp, strew some salt over them and let them remain thus for two or three days, occasionally stirring and moving them about. Press out the juice and to each quart of walnut liquor allow the above proportion of vinegar, soy, cayenne, shalots, garlic and port wine. Pound each ingredient separately in a mortar, then mix them well together and store away for use in small bottles. The corks should be well sealed.
SEASONABLE.- This sauce should be made as soon as walnuts are obtainable, from the beginning to the middle of July.
The method is sound Victorian spit-cookery, but the bird at the centre of it is no longer a lawful ingredient in Britain or in most of Europe. The notes below explain the obstacle and unpick the older kitchen language.
- The birdThe lark of this recipe is the skylark, Alauda arvensis, which is a protected species: it may not be killed, taken or sold, and there is no legal supply. The same applies to the other small songbirds that once reached British markets by the dozen. This dish cannot be sourced today; if you want small roast game birds, work from a current recipe for farmed quail.
- "Roast before a quick fire"Nothing here is oven work. The birds were trussed on a spit set before an open fire at fierce heat and turned constantly, basted -- as the text says -- with fresh butter. The repeated egg-and-crumb basting builds a crust in layers, much like a modern raspings coating.
- The stated hourAn hour is far too long for a bird of this size by any modern reckoning and belongs to the drop of heat and the constant turning of open-hearth roasting. The broiling time of 10 to 15 minutes is closer to the truth of how quickly such birds cook.
- Fried crumbs and clarified butterThe bed of crumbs is not garnish but function: it soaks the fat and juices. Clarified butter is butter with the milk solids and water removed, which is why it will fry crumbs golden without burning.
- Old money1s. 6d. to 2s. a dozen means one shilling and sixpence to two shillings for twelve birds, roughly three-halfpence to twopence a bird.
- Terms in the companion entries"Blanch" the onions means a brief boil to soften and take the rawness out, not a modern ice-bath refresh. "Buttered paper" is greased parchment laid over the top, the ancestor of a foil cover. "Spanish sauce" is sauce espagnole, the brown stock-based sauce of classical French practice.
- Walnuts for the sauceThe Leamington Sauce depends on green walnuts picked while the shell is still soft enough to pierce with a pin; the text puts the window from the beginning to the middle of July. Indian soy is an early commercial soy sauce. The port and garlic quantities in the text as printed are incomplete.
Small birds were a staple of English cookery for centuries, netted in large numbers on downland and stubble in autumn and sold by the dozen alongside sparrows and wheatears. Mrs Beeton's note that larks are "in full season in November" reflects the trade in birds taken as they flocked after harvest. The taste for them lasted longer in Italy and France than in Britain. Protective legislation began with the Wild Birds Protection Acts of the late nineteenth century, though larks were still sold in London markets into the early twentieth century and full protection came only with the Protection of Birds Act 1954, followed by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981; recipes like this one now read as records of a lost food economy rather than as instructions.