NTS
Wheatears; fresh butter.
After the birds are picked, gutted and cleaned, truss them like larks, put them down to a quick fire, and baste them well with fresh butter. When done, which will be in about 20 minutes, dish them on fried bread-crumbs, and garnish the dish with slices of lemon.
TIME.-20 minutes.
SEASONABLE from July to October.
The method is straightforward roasting, but the bird itself is the problem: wheatears are wild passerines that cannot legally or ethically be taken or sold today.
- The bird is protectedThe northern wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe) is a wild bird protected in the UK under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which makes it an offence to kill, take or sell it. In the United States the same species falls under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and across Europe it is covered by the Birds Directive.
- No legal supply existsThere is no farmed or commercial source. Any bird you could obtain would have been taken from the wild, which is precisely what the law prohibits, so the recipe cannot be sourced at all rather than merely being difficult.
- If you want the dish's shapeThe pattern here — small bird, hard butter basting, fried crumbs, lemon — belongs to a whole family of Victorian game cookery. Use a current recipe for farmed quail or poussin instead and leave the wheatears alone.
Wheatears were a genuine local delicacy on the South Downs, where Sussex shepherds trapped them in turf-covered pits and coop nets during the late-summer passage and sold them by the dozen to inns and coaching houses in Brighton and Eastbourne; they were often marketed as the "English ortolan", trading on the reputation of the fat bunting eaten in France and Italy. The July-to-October season Mrs Beeton gives is exactly the autumn migration window, when the birds were at their fattest. Trapping on this scale is generally reckoned to have collapsed in the later nineteenth century as the shepherding economy changed and public taste turned against small-bird eating, and successive protection acts finished the trade. The recipe survives in editions of Beeton long after anyone could reasonably act on it, which is a useful reminder that these books were compiled by accretion: entries stayed in print for decades after the food they described had gone.