Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Braised Plovers
Braised Plovers
Line a braisingpan with sliced bacon and beef cut about half an inch thick, put in a couple of carrots, two small onions, a bunch of thyme and bay leaves, together with some mixed herbs, pepper and salt, and a little grated nutmeg and mixed spice; then put in the birds, fasten on the lid tightly, solder the edges of the pan to prevent air from getting inside, and cover the lid with live embers, simmer until done, or nearly so, when the heat should be somewhat lessened until quite cooked, then place on a hot dish and stand them near the fire. Skim off all the fat from the liquor and pass it through a fine hair-sieve over the birds, squeeze the juice of a lemon over, and garnish with egg croquettes and watercress.
This is a wild-game braise from the era when small shorebirds were sold by the brace in city markets. Two things in it put it out of reach now: the bird itself, and the sealed pan.
- Plovers are protectedGolden, black-bellied, piping and semipalmated plovers are all covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 in the United States, and there is no legal commercial source there. Protection elsewhere is not uniform: the grey (black-bellied) plover is fully protected in the UK, but the European golden plover remains a quarry species with an open season. The piping plover is additionally listed as threatened or endangered across much of its range.
- Soldering the lid"Solder the edges of the pan" appears to mean literally running solder around the joint between pan and lid, the technique used for potted and tinned goods, though period cookery also sealed lids with a flour-and-water luting paste. Solder of the period was generally lead-based, and applying it to a vessel holding food and fat is not something to repeat in a kitchen.
- A sealed vessel under embersEven with lead set aside, a metal pan sealed airtight and then buried in live coals is a pressure vessel with no relief valve and no gauge. Steam pressure builds with no way to vent, and the seal is the weakest point.
- No temperature, no time"Simmer until done, or nearly so" was workable for a cook who knew the bird and the hearth. Sealed and buried in embers, there is no way to check either the internal temperature of the birds or the state of the pork and beef lining, and small game birds are commonly carriers of Campylobacter and Salmonella.
- If you want the dishThe braise itself, bacon and beef lining the pan, carrot, onion, thyme, bay, nutmeg and mixed spice, the liquor skimmed and strained over, lemon and watercress, is a common nineteenth-century treatment for small dark-meated birds. Use a current recipe for farmed quail or squab, in an ordinary covered pot, cooked to a measured temperature.
- Terms in the originalA hair-sieve is a fine mesh strainer. "Mixed spice" is the British blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ginger and clove. "Egg croquettes" here are breaded and fried balls of chopped hard-boiled egg bound with thick béchamel, a common garnish for game in the period.
Plover was a luxury bird on American and European tables through the nineteenth century, shot in large numbers on coastal flats and marshes and shipped to city markets alongside snipe, woodcock and rail. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book appeared in 1896, at the height of the market-gunning trade and just as it began to collapse: the Lacey Act of 1900 curbed interstate traffic in illegally taken game, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended the commercial hunting of shorebirds outright. The Eskimo curlew, sold in the same market baskets, was effectively hunted to extinction. Sealing the pan with solder and burying it in embers belongs to an older tradition still, the closed braise or étuvée in which nothing escapes. The recipe is a useful marker of how quickly a dish can pass from restaurant menu to legal impossibility.