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Fried Reedbirds
Pluck and dress the birds, splitting them down the back; season them rather highly with salt and pepper, roll them in flour, cornmeal or sifted bread or cracker crumbs and fry them brown in butter or lard equally mixed and made smoking hot before the birds are placed in it. Or dress, split and season them. They must be served hot as soon as they are brown.
The cooking here is straightforward; the problem is the bird. Reedbirds are bobolinks, and they cannot legally be taken, bought, sold or served in the United States or Canada.
- The bird is protected"Reedbird" was the market name for the bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) in its fat autumn plumage, when flocks fed in the wild rice and reed marshes of the Atlantic coast. It is a migratory songbird covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which ended the commercial market hunting that supplied Oscar's kitchen.
- Possession, not just huntingThe prohibition reaches beyond shooting. Buying, selling, transporting or possessing the birds, alive or dressed, is an offence, and no cooking method makes that otherwise.
- Substitution is not a fixPeople sometimes suggest quail or small squab as stand-ins. That is a different dish with different fat, different bone structure and different timing; use a current recipe written for the bird you actually have rather than adapting this one.
- Why it reads so casuallyThe instruction to fry them "brown" with no time given suits a bird of only an ounce or two, which would cook through in a few minutes. Small birds of this kind were often served several to a plate; the recipe, in any case, gives no yield.
- The one thing that carries overHalf butter, half lard, brought to smoking before anything goes in, is sound practice for any small dredged item. The mixture gives butter flavour with a fat that tolerates the heat, and a hot pan sets the crumb coating instead of soaking it.
Reedbirds were an autumn delicacy of the mid-Atlantic, taken in enormous numbers in the tidal marshes of the Delaware and the Chesapeake as bobolinks fattened on wild rice during their southward migration. Philadelphia and Baltimore markets sold them by the dozen and by the barrel, and New York hotels put them on the fall bill of fare much as European kitchens did the ortolan: whole, small, highly seasoned, eaten in a mouthful or two. Their appearance in a Waldorf book from the turn of the century is a fair measure of how ordinary market-gunned songbirds still were on a luxury menu. The trade in them collapsed within a generation, first under state game laws and then decisively under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, and the bobolink survives today largely as a grassland bird of conservation concern rather than a commodity.