Ortolans, Roast
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons. birds, 4 vineleaves, 2 rounds of toast, 1/4 lb. of butter. AVERAGE COST, 6s.
Keep the birds till tender, then pluck, truss and wipe carefully, but do not draw them. Wrap each bird in a freshlygathered vine-leaf, tie them on a bird-spit and roast them for 25 minutes, or rather less if they are small. Place the slices of toast in the pan to catch the trail, melt the butter in the pan and baste incessantly.
To have ortolans cooked to perfection, it is absolutely necessary that the basting should be kept up. Dish them on the toast, and send some good gravy to table with them.
TIME.-25 minutes to roast.
SEASONABLE from October to February.
This recipe cannot be followed today: the ortolan is a protected species and both its capture and its sale are illegal across Europe and elsewhere. The notes below explain what the original is asking for and why the dish is closed to us.
- The bird itselfThe ortolan is Emberiza hortulana, the ortolan bunting, a small migratory songbird. It is protected under the EU Birds Directive and comparable wildlife law elsewhere; trapping, killing, selling and serving it are offences, though enforcement in France, long the centre of the trade, was for many years lax. No substitute is offered here, and none should be improvised from other wild songbirds, which are protected on the same basis.
- "Keep the birds till tender"This means hanging the birds unrefrigerated until the flesh softens — the standard Victorian treatment of small game. It is a deliberate ambient-temperature ageing with no time, temperature or humidity given, and it is not a practice that can be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen.
- "Do not draw them"The birds are roasted with the viscera intact, and the toast beneath is there to catch the drippings from them — the "trail". Cooking whole undrawn small birds means the gut contents are eaten along with the meat, which is precisely the intended flavour and precisely why the method has no modern parallel.
- The cost lineSix shillings for the dish was a substantial sum in the period. Ortolans were never everyday food.
- The vine leafA freshly gathered grape leaf wrapped round the bird acted as a self-basting jacket, keeping the skin from scorching on the spit. The technique survives legitimately in other cookery — quail, small game birds, some fish are still wrapped in vine leaves before roasting or grilling.
- Bird-spit and bastingA bird-spit is a small horizontal spit for several tiny carcasses at once, turned before an open fire with a dripping pan below. The insistence on ceaseless basting is a fire-cooking instruction: without it, a bird that size dries out in minutes. As written, this is spit-roasting rather than oven work.
- If you have come here for dinnerUse a current recipe for a small farmed bird — quail or poussin are what a modern kitchen roasts at this scale — rather than adapting the instructions above.
Ortolans were caught in nets on autumn migration, then fattened in darkened cages and traditionally drowned in armagnac before cooking, a practice associated above all with the Landes region of southwest France. The bird has become the standard example of gastronomic excess: it was eaten whole, bones and all, sometimes under a napkin, a ritual often explained as concealing the diner's greed from God, though that explanation is folklore rather than documented custom. Mrs Beeton's book records it without comment because in the nineteenth century a well-stocked British game dealer might carry small wild birds of many kinds, and larks, thrushes, wheatears and buntings all appear in cookery books of the period. The change since then is legal and ecological rather than culinary: ortolan populations fell sharply through the twentieth century, France banned the hunt in 1979 and, after years of tolerated poaching, tightened enforcement following EU pressure. The recipe survives now as a document of what the Victorian table considered ordinary luxury, and of how narrow the modern range of edible birds has become by comparison.