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Broiled Plovers
Secure six fine fat plovers, pick, singe, draw and wipe them well, pick out the eyes, and split them through the back without separating the parts, and place them upon a dish. Season with a pinch of salt and half as much pepper, and add a tablespoonful of oil. Rub in the seasoning thoroughly, and place the birds on a broiler to cook for four minutes on either side; then dress them on a hot dish with six pieces of toast, spread over a gill of maitre d'hotel butter, decorating with a little watercress, and serve.
This is a recipe from an era when wild shorebirds were sold by the dozen in city markets. That trade is over, and the birds themselves are the reason this dish cannot be reproduced.
- Plovers are protectedIn the United States, plovers are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which makes it unlawful to kill, possess or sell them without a permit. Similar protection applies across Canada, the UK and the EU. There is no legal supply of plovers for the table, and several species — the piping plover among them — are separately listed as endangered or threatened.
- Market gunning is what the law endedBirds like these reached city restaurants through commercial hunters who shipped game to urban markets. That trade drove steep declines in shorebird populations across the eastern flyway in the late nineteenth century, and ending it was among the main purposes of the 1918 treaty.
- "Draw" means eviscerateGame birds of this size were frequently cooked undrawn, trail and all, as woodcock and snipe generally were, so the instruction to draw them is worth noting.
- A gillHalf a cup. Maître d'hôtel butter is softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper — a standard finishing butter of the period, still useful on grilled meat and fish.
- Eight minutes total is very rareEight minutes total is short -- Four minutes a side on a split bird of this size will leave it pink at the bone, in keeping with the period taste for game served underdone. Modern poultry handling assumes nothing of the kind.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for farmed quail or squab, which are sold legally and are handled to modern standards. Do not attempt to substitute anything taken from the wild.
Oscar Tschirky was the maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf-Astoria, presiding over its dining rooms front of house rather than running its kitchens, at the moment when wild game was still an ordinary restaurant commodity in New York. Menus from the 1890s and early 1900s list plover, snipe, woodcock, canvasback duck and reedbird alongside beef and mutton, all supplied by market hunters. Plovers u2014 usually the golden plover or the black-bellied — were treated as a delicacy of the shore, small enough that six made a dish for a few diners, and rich enough to be served plainly split, broiled and set on toast with a green butter. Within roughly twenty years of this book's publication, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act had removed the whole category from American menus, and recipes like this one survive mainly as a record of how much a nineteenth-century kitchen took for granted about wild birds.