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Fried Plovers with Truffles
Place four plovers in a saucepan after cleaning, drawing and trussing them, and add five ounces of butter, a couple of cloves, and a few raw truffles cut into slices, with salt and pepper to taste. Place the pan over a brisk fire and cook for about ten minutes or so, then add two tablespoonfuls of flour and a wineglassful of white wine to a half pint of the stock; pour it into a saucepan, place it over a fire and cook gently for twenty minutes, stirring frequently. When done, arrange the birds on a dish, add the juice of one lemon to the stock, boil again for a few minutes, and pour it over the plovers, and they are ready for serving.
The technique here is unremarkable — birds browned in butter, a flour-thickened wine and stock sauce finished with lemon — but the principal ingredient cannot lawfully be obtained in the United States or most of Europe today.
- Plovers are protected birdsAll North American plovers are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which makes it an offence to take, kill, possess, sell or serve them. Several species, including the piping plover, carry additional endangered or threatened protection. There is no legal market source, wild or farmed.
- The market that supplied this dish no longer existsSmall shorebirds reached city game dealers through commercial market hunting, a trade the law ended as the populations fell. Anything sold as "plover" in the United States now should be treated as mislabelled.
- Use a current recipe insteadIf you want a butter-and-truffle treatment of small game birds, work from a modern recipe written for a bird that is legally raised and sold. Do not substitute into this one blind — the timings assume a bird of a few ounces, cooked whole.
- Units, for reading purposesA wineglassful is conventionally reckoned at about a quarter cup; half a pint of stock is one cup. Five ounces of butter for four small birds is in line with period practice rather than a misprint.
- An ambiguity in the originalThe instruction to "add two tablespoonfuls of flour and a wineglassful of white wine to a half pint of the stock" never says where the stock comes from.
Small shorebirds were standard luxury game on American hotel menus from the 1870s through the turn of the century, and Oscar Tschirky's book — published in 1896, when he was maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf — treats plover as unremarkable kitchen game. Such birds arrived through the same commercial game trade that supplied canvasback duck and prairie chicken, and they vanished from menus for the same reason: the Lacey Act of 1900 restricted interstate traffic in illegally taken game, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 closed the market on migratory shorebirds outright. Recipes like this one are useful mainly as a record of what a great hotel kitchen could buy before that happened, and of how little cooking such a bird was thought to need — ten minutes in butter, a truffle or two, and a sharp lemon sauce poured over at the last moment.