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Sparrow Dumpling
787. Mix half a pint of good milk with three eggs, a little salt, and as much flour as will make it a thick batter. Put a lump of butter rolled in pepper and salt into every sparrow, mix them in the batter, and tie them in a basin with a cloth; boil them half an hour. Serve with melted butter poured over.
This is a boiled batter pudding built around whole small birds, and the birds are the problem. It cannot be sourced or made legally in Britain or North America today.
- The house sparrow is protectedIn the UK the house sparrow is protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and it sits on the red list of birds of conservation concern after steep population declines. In the United States the Migratory Bird Treaty Act covers native sparrow species, though the house sparrow itself is an introduced bird and is not federally protected there. In Britain, killing, taking or possessing them for the table is not lawful, and in neither country is there a legitimate commercial supply.
- There is no inspected equivalentWild small birds are not slaughtered, bled, chilled or inspected under any food-safety regime. Anything shot and pocketed carries the usual wild-game risks of gut contamination and lead fragments, with none of the controls that apply to farmed poultry.
- Half an hour is nowhere near enoughHalf an hour is short by modern standards -- a cloth-tied basin of cold batter boiled thirty minutes may not be set through at the centre, and the enclosed birds will be the last part to heat. The original assumes very small carcasses and offers no guidance at all on interior temperature.
- Make something else insteadIf a boiled batter pudding with meat in it is the aim, use a current recipe for a suet or batter pudding with farmed poultry or beef, worked out with proper cooking times.
Small-bird cookery ran right through English country practice, and sparrows in particular were treated less as game than as vermin turned to account. Nineteenth-century parishes in many districts ran "sparrow clubs" that paid by the dozen for birds taken off the corn, and the carcasses went into pies, puddings and dumplings rather than being wasted. The method here is standard boiled-pudding technique of the period: a batter of milk, egg and flour tied in a cloth-covered basin and set in the copper, the same treatment given to bacon puddings and to plain batter served with roast meat. "Melted butter" in this period usually meant a thin flour-thickened butter sauce rather than simply butter warmed, and it was a common accompaniment to such dishes. The dish reads today mainly as a record of how thoroughly farmland birds were once regarded as a nuisance crop \the the the house schampion sparrow now among the species Britain most actively protects.