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Broiled Reedbirds
Dress the reedbirds without splitting them, place an oyster in each one, season them with salt and pepper, broil them quickly over a hot clear fire for about five minutes, and serve at once.
This dish cannot be prepared today. The bird it calls for is a protected migratory songbird, and taking, possessing or serving one is illegal across the United States and Canada.
- What a reedbird is"Reedbird" was the market name for the bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), shot in enormous numbers in the tidal marshes of the mid-Atlantic in late summer when the birds fattened on wild rice and reed grass. The same bird was sold as "ricebird" further south.
- Legal statusThe bobolink is covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which ended the commercial market hunting of songbirds. There is no lawful source for the bird, wild or farmed, and possession of the carcass is itself an offence.
- Ortolan and its kinReedbird cookery belongs to the same vanished family as ortolan and lark, all of which are now restricted or banned in the jurisdictions where they were once eaten. Recipes of this type survive in old books as records rather than as instructions.
- The oysterAn oyster tucked into the body cavity appears in period recipes for tiny birds; it kept the interior moist over a fierce fire and added seasoning without a bread stuffing. It also means the oyster receives only the five minutes of broiling the bird gets, which is not a reliable cook for a raw shellfish.
- "Dress without splitting"The bird was broiled whole rather than split open, and small birds of this kind were often served head and all and eaten bones and all. The instruction signals how small the carcass was, roughly the size of a large plum.
- If you want the techniqueFor small birds cooked hot and fast with a shellfish or herb in the cavity, use a current recipe written for a legally sold species.
Reedbirds were one of the great seasonal luxuries of the American Atlantic coast in the nineteenth century. Bobolinks migrating south in August and September gorged on the seed heads of wild rice in the Delaware and Chesapeake marshes and grew so fat that they were shot by the barrelful and shipped by rail to the hotels and oyster houses of Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York. The terseness of the instruction here is the tell: a cook of that period needed no explanation of a bird he might handle by the dozen on an autumn evening. The market collapsed by law rather than by taste. Reformers, ornithologists and the Audubon societies campaigned through the 1890s and 1900s against the commerce in songbirds, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 closed it entirely. Recipes like this one sit on the far side of that line and read now as a record of what an American restaurant menu once contained.