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Fried Ortolans
Draw and singe twenty-four ortolans, put them in a fryingpan with some melted bacon and two bay leaves sprinkled over with salt and pepper and fry over a brisk fire, turning them frequently. Strain off the fat, add some vinegar and some melted glaze and reduce the liquor quickly over a brisk fire. Take out the bay leaves, add a salpicon of lean smoked ham steeped in water and a little Spanish sauce reduced with white wine and warm the ham without boiling the liquor. Arrange the birds in a pile in the center of a dish, pour the sauce over, and serve with a garnish of small quenelles.
This dish cannot be made today: its single ingredient is a bird that is protected under law across its range. The notes below are for reading the recipe, not for cooking it.
- The bird itselfThe ortolan is a small European bunting, Emberiza hortulana. Its populations collapsed through the twentieth century, and hunting, sale and consumption are prohibited in France and across the European Union under the Birds Directive; in the United States, native buntings and comparable songbirds are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Twenty-four of them is not a quantity anyone can lawfully obtain.
- How they were producedThe historical practice behind recipes like this involved trapping wild birds and fattening them in darkness before killing them; accounts commonly describe the birds being drowned in armagnac. That husbandry is itself illegal now, and there is no farmed or substitute source that the recipe can be redirected to.
- Anyone wanting a small-bird dishQuail is the usual modern stand-in for game-bird recipes of this scale, but the method here — the frying time, the quantity of sauce, the pile of two dozen carcasses — is written for a bird of a different size and fat content. Use a current quail recipe rather than adapting this one.
- "Melted bacon"Rendered bacon fat, not rashers.
- GlazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced until it sets to a dark, sticky jelly at room temperature. A spoonful dissolved in the pan gave the instant body and gloss that this style of sauce depends on.
- SalpiconA dice of one or more ingredients cut small and even, here lean smoked ham. Steeping it in water first drew out salt, which matters when the sauce underneath has already been reduced hard.
- Spanish sauceThe usual period English rendering of espagnole, the brown mother sauce of the classical repertoire — brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours.
- Warm without boilingThe one piece of technique worth keeping from the page. Once ham dice and a finished brown sauce are combined, boiling dulls the smoke and clouds the reduction; the sauce is only brought back to serving heat.
- QuenellesPoached dumplings of pounded forcemeat, shaped between two spoons. A garnish of this kind would most likely have used a veal or game forcemeat, poached to order.
Ortolans belong to the extravagant end of European haute cuisine, eaten whole — bones, fat and all — and traditionally under a napkin draped over the head, a gesture variously explained as trapping the aroma or hiding the diner's gluttony from God. Both explanations are folklore rather than documented fact, but the ritual was real enough to persist into the twentieth century. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 out of the Waldorf's kitchens, catalogued the full French repertoire that a great American hotel was expected to command, and small wild birds — reed birds, plover, snipe, ortolans — appear throughout it as a matter of course. The dish is a useful marker of how much has changed: what a menu once listed as a luxury is now a conservation offence, and the recipe survives mainly as evidence of an appetite that helped empty the hedgerows.