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Ballotines of Larks
Bone the required quantity of larks, fill them with chicken forcemeat, place a truffle turned to a ball shape into each bird, and fold them round it. Tie each lark up in a small cloth and braise it in Madeira and mirepoix. Place a bed of mashed potatoes on a hot dish, take the cloth off the larks, arrange them over the center of the bed, reduce some Spanish sauce with essence of lark, pour it over the larks, and serve.
This is a period restaurant dish that cannot be reproduced legally in the United States or most of Europe, because its main ingredient is a protected wild songbird. The notes below explain the barrier and gloss the kitchen vocabulary Oscar assumed his readers knew.
- The birds are protectedSkylarks and the related small songbirds sold as "larks" in nineteenth-century markets are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in the United States, where killing, buying, selling or possessing them is an offence. In Europe the skylark is covered by the EU Birds Directive, which permits hunting in certain member states but restricts commercial sale; either way there is no ordinary commercial supply for the kitchen.
- No safe or legal substitution is offered hereRecipes of this type were built around a bird of a specific size, bone structure and flavour, and the "essence of lark" in the sauce comes from the same source. If you want a stuffed, boned small bird, use a current recipe written for quail or poussin rather than adapting this one.
- BallotineA boned bird or piece of meat stuffed, rolled and tied into a compact shape, then braised. Oscar's cloth wrapping holds the shape during cooking; the cloth is tied tight and removed afterwards so the ballotine arrives unmarked.
- MirepoixIn this period it is not a raw flavour base but a braising bed: diced carrot, onion and celery, usually with a little ham or bacon fat, cooked under the meat in the wine and strained out or reduced into the sauce.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce of the classical repertoire, made from brown stock, browned mirepoix and a brown roux and reduced for hours. "Essence of lark" would have been a concentrated stock made from the carcasses left over from boning.
- MadeiraBraising liquor here, not a garnish. Savoury classical work called for dry Madeira; the sweet dessert Madeiras sold today would throw the reduction out of balance.
- Truffle turned to a ball"Turned" means cut and pared to a shape with a small knife, in this case a sphere set inside the forcemeat so each portion showed a black centre when cut. The trimmings would have gone into the forcemeat or the sauce.
Small birds were standard luxury game in European and American hotel cookery well into the twentieth century, sold by the dozen in market stalls and served whole, spitted, in pies, or boned and stuffed as here. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) reflects the Waldorf's French kitchen at a moment when the sheer variety of wild birds on a hotel menu was itself part of the display: larks, ortolans, reed-birds, plover and snipe all appear alongside the beef and terrapin. The trade that supplied them was largely destroyed by its own success. Market hunting for the table and the millinery trade collapsed songbird populations in North America, and the resulting outcry produced the Lacey Act of 1900 and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which ended commercial traffic in wild songbirds. Recipes like this one survive as a record of a kind of eating that the law deliberately closed off, and of a professional technique — boning, forcemeat, ballotine, reduced essence — that simply migrated to poultry.