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Broiled Ortolans in Papers
Rub with melted butter or salad oil as many sheets of paper as there are birds and cut them just large enough to double over the birds and turn in all round the edges like a hem in order to preserve the fat and trail while the birds are being cooked. Carefully pluck and singe the birds, cut off the beaks and claws, skin the heads and necks and wipe them with a clean cloth; twist the feet, lay the heads close to the sides of the birds and inclose in the paper. Place them on a gridiron over a very slow fire and broil for about five minutes or until they swim in their own fat. Serve them at once in the papers on a plate covered with watercress. The papers are not to be removed till just before eating the birds.
This is a period record of a dish that can no longer be cooked. The bird at its center is a protected species, and the points below explain what the recipe assumes and why it is now a closed door.
- The bird is protectedThe ortolan is a bunting, Emberiza hortulana, a small migratory songbird. It is protected across Europe, where trapping and sale have been illegal in France since 1999, and in the United States wild native songbirds are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. There is no legal commercial supply.
- How they were obtainedAccounts describe the birds being netted on migration, kept in darkness (some sources say blinded) to induce continuous feeding, fattened on millet, and killed by drowning in armagnac. The method has drawn its own objections, though the protection statutes followed from conservation law and population decline.
- "Trail" means the entrailsThe birds are not drawn. The trail is the intestinal content, and the buttered paper exists to trap it along with the rendering fat. Any modern reading of the recipe has to reckon with the fact that the whole bird, viscera and bones and head, was eaten in one or two mouthfuls.
- The papersThis is broiling in paper, en papillote fashion: ordinary paper rubbed with butter or oil, folded and hemmed at the edges, over a gridiron. The seal keeps the fat from dripping into the fire, and the recipe specifies that the papers are not opened until just before eating.
- "A very slow fire"Low, steady heat rather than flame. Five minutes is a plausible timing for a bird of this size, and the endpoint given, when they swim in their own fat, is the useful instruction rather than the clock.
- If you want the techniqueThe buttered-paper broil is the transferable part of this entry, but for any small game bird a current recipe with tested handling and temperatures should be used. Nothing here should be read as a working method.
Ortolans were among the most freighted luxuries of classical French cookery, eaten whole and, by long-standing custom, under a napkin draped over the head, a gesture variously explained as concentrating the aroma or as concealing the act from God, though both explanations are traditional rather than documented. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's reputation, compiled this book, published in 1896, for a New York clientele that measured itself against Paris, and the presence of ortolans on his pages says as much about what the hotel could procure as about how it cooked. The recipe's brevity is telling: no seasoning, no sauce, nothing but butter, paper and a slow fire. The species has since declined steeply, with agricultural change and trapping both implicated, and the dish passed from the repertoire into the record.