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.
Home › Wild Meat › Papabote or Bartramian Sandsniper
Papabote or Bartramian Sandsniper
Empty the birds and save all edible innards except the gizzard which must be thrown away according to Creole custom. Chop and fry remaining giblets including trail, using a very little butter for frying since this is a rich bird. Leave birds whole, season them, put a bit of butter inside, wrap in very thin bacon strips, place in a baking pan with just enough water to wet bottom of pan and a tiny bit of butter, set in a hot oven for 20-30 minutes and turn birds over at least once to cook them evenly. Spread fried trail and giblets on toast, sprinkle with a few drops of lemon juice, lay birds on top and pour pan gravy over them. Or, prepare birds as above and broil or roast on the spit, instead of roasting in the oven.
This is a market-hunter's recipe for a shorebird that can no longer legally be taken, cooked in a style that assumes birds served rare and largely undrawn. The notes below explain the terms and why the dish belongs to history rather than to a menu.
- The bird is federally protectedThe papabote is the upland sandpiper, Bartramia longicauda, described in older works as the Bartramian sandpiper. It is a migratory bird protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and it is listed as threatened or endangered in a number of states. Taking, possessing, buying or serving one is an offence, and no part of this recipe can lawfully be carried out.
- Market hunting is what the recipe recordsRecipes like this existed because shorebirds were shot in quantity and sold by the dozen. The species' collapse across the prairie and Gulf flyway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is directly tied to that trade, which is precisely why the legal protection exists.
- "Trail" means the undrawn intestineIn game cookery the trail is the lower gut, traditionally eaten in snipe, woodcock and other small shorebirds on the grounds that they are supposed to void themselves in flight. It carries the bird's gut contents and its bacterial load, and modern food handling does not accept it in any species.
- The gizzard rule is custom, not hygieneDiscarding the gizzard while keeping the rest of the innards reflects Creole practice for these birds. It has no bearing on safety: the muscular gizzard is the least hazardous of the giblets, and the trail is the most.
- Wild-shot birds carry shot and leadAny small bird taken with a shotgun and cooked whole retains pellets, and lead pellets fragment. This is a recognised source of lead exposure in wild game, and it is a further reason the technique here is not transferable.
- "Hot oven" and the short roastA hot oven in a book of this period is generally glossed as somewhere in the region of 400 to 450F, though period sources are not consistent. Twenty to thirty minutes is a short roast for a bird cooked with its innards in place, in keeping with the old game-cookery preference for small birds served underdone, and it would not bring the innards or the cavity to a safe temperature.
- If you want the dishNothing here can be adapted into a lawful version, because the ingredient itself is the problem. Cook a farmed quail or squab from a current recipe instead and leave this page as a document.