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Broiled Larks
Truss and prepare the required quantity of larks; brush over with beaten eggs, sprinkle with plenty of breadcrumbs, place them on a gridiron, and broil over a very clear fire. Lay some slices of bread on a hot dish, dress the larks on them, pour a little rich brown gravy around, and serve.
This is a legal problem rather than a cooking problem: the bird at the centre of the dish cannot be obtained or served in the United States or most of Europe.
- Larks are protectedThe small songbirds sold by the dozen in nineteenth-century markets are, in the United States, covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and in Europe by the EU Birds Directive. In practice there is no licensed commercial source for the table, though some European states have maintained limited derogations for traditional lark trapping.
- No lawful substitute is impliedThe recipe depends on a whole bird a few inches long, broiled over coals. Quail and other farmed game birds behave differently on a gridiron, so this is not a matter of swapping one ingredient for another; use a current recipe written for whatever bird you can legally buy.
- Wild-caught small birds carry their own risksBeyond the law, songbirds taken from the wild are unscreened for avian pathogens.
- "Truss and prepare" hides most of the workFor a bird this size the phrase covers plucking, singeing and trussing, and period practice varied as to whether the bird was drawn or the head left on. The recipe as printed gives no guidance for anyone starting from a whole bird.
- "A very clear fire" is not a temperatureIt means hardwood coals burned down past all smoke and flame, radiating steadily. The recipe gives no time, no distance from the coals and no doneness cue, so even for a legal bird the method would have to be reconstructed from scratch.
- The brown gravy is a separate undertaking"Rich brown gravy" in a kitchen of this scale would normally have come from a made brown sauce or reduced brown stock rather than pan drippings. Any modern reading of this dish would need that sauce built independently.
Small birds were standard restaurant fare in the late nineteenth century, sold by the dozen in city markets and treated much like oysters or sweetbreads — a garnish-scale luxury eaten in quantity. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, records the repertoire of a hotel kitchen, one that presumably had the hands to do the plucking and trussing, which is why the recipe disposes of that work in the two words "truss and prepare." The market for wild songbirds collapsed within a generation: the American plume and game trade came under federal pressure with the Lacey Act of 1900, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended commercial traffic in native migratory birds outright. Recipes like this one survive mainly as evidence of how much broader the definition of edible game once was, and of how quickly conservation law rewrote a menu.