Important: Safety Warning
This page describes collecting wild birds' eggs, shooting birds for specimens, or similar practices. These activities are now illegal under wildlife-protection laws, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and they contributed to the decline of the very species described.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Lark Patties
Lark Patties
Clean and bone the required quantity of larks, open and season them slightly; mix some forcemeat with a little chopped truffles, place a little in each lark and roll them up in a round shape. Line some small pie-moulds with short paste, put a layer of forcemeat at the bottom of each mould, then the larks, spread another thin layer of forcemeat on the top, cover the patties with short paste, pinching the edges to make them stick, egg the tops, then put a round of puff paste on each. Egg the tops once more and place the patties in a hot oven to bake for twenty minutes. When they are cooked cut off the covers and pour in one tablespoonful of Spanish sauce, reduced with a little essence of lark, place the covers on again and serve while they are hot. Larks, Portuguese Style Single, clean, bone and cut the wings and legs off one dozen larks, place the bones and trimmings in a stewpan with a small carrot and a small onion cut into slices a bay leaf, a few cloves, a bunch of parsley, and cover the bottom of the stewpan with some sherry wine; allow this to reduce, then moisten with good gravy; let all simmer gently for an hour, then strain it. Prepare a chicken forcemeat and place it in a biscuit bag, also have cooked a dozen small black truffles, as round as possible, and no larger than an olive. Stuff the larks with the forcemeat and put in the center of them a small round truffle, roll the larks very neatly and wrap each in a piece of muslin, and tie with a string. Put them into a stewpan with some bacon over the bottom, and pour in a little strong gravy as above, and bake them in a hot oven for thirty minutes. Meanwhile prepare and cook one dozen mushrooms, take half a pint of Spanish sauce and place it in a sautepan with the same quantity of tomato sauce, six tablespoonfuls of gravy and a little essence of lark, reduced to half-glaze. Shape the mushrooms with a plain round cutter, arrange them in a sautepan, unwrap and place one on each lark, sticking them with the remains of the chicken forcemeat, cover and place in the oven for a few minutes. Sauce them, dress them on a plain border made from chicken forcemeat or mashed potatoes, and pile in the center some rice cooked with white stock. Put a little of the sauce over the larks, and serve the remainder in a sauceboat.
These two preparations are read now rather than cooked: the bird at their center cannot legally be bought, hunted or served in the United States or in most of Europe. The notes below explain the obstacle and decode the professional shorthand so the page can be read as the kitchen document it is.
- The birds are protected"Lark" on an American hotel menu of this period could mean the European skylark, imported for the trade, or native birds sold under the same name. In the United States larks and other native songbirds are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918; the horned lark and meadowlark cannot be taken, sold or possessed. In Europe the skylark is covered by the Birds Directive, and although hunting is still permitted in some member states under Annex II, the commercial trade in wild-caught small passerines that supplied recipes like this one is prohibited.
- No substitution is offered hereSwapping in quail or squab does not reproduce the dish, because both recipes are built on lark bones and lark trimmings for their stock and "essence." If you want a boned, forcemeat-stuffed small bird in pastry, work from a current recipe for a legally sold bird rather than adapting this one.
- Essence of larkA concentrated lark reduction used to sharpen the finished sauce. Note that the recipe lists it separately from the strained stock of bones, wings and legs cooked with sherry and gravy, so the two are not necessarily the same preparation. Oscar assumes the reader has both this and a stockpot of "good gravy" already going, which is what marks these as brigade recipes rather than household ones.
- Spanish sauceEspagnole: brown roux, brown stock and mirepoix, reduced. "Reduced to half-glaze" means taken down toward demi-glace, thick enough to coat. A modern kitchen would reach for demi-glace or a reduced brown stock.
- Short paste and puff pasteShort paste is a plain shortcrust for lining and covering the moulds; the round of puff paste laid on top after the first egg wash is decorative, a raised cap that bakes up above the pie. Both tops are egged so the seam browns and seals.
- A biscuit bagA piping bag. The chicken forcemeat is piped into each boned bird so that the truffle sits centered, then the bird is rolled and wrapped in muslin and tied — the muslin holds the cylinder together through baking and is removed before saucing.
- ScaleThe Portuguese version is written for one dozen birds, with a dozen truffles and a dozen mushrooms to match; the patties simply call for "the required quantity" of larks and give no yield.
Small birds eaten whole were standard luxury restaurant fare in the late nineteenth century, and larks, ortolans, thrushes and plover appear throughout the French repertoire that Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen worked from — Escoffier's Guide Culinaire, published a few years after this book, still lists mauviettes and alouettes as a matter of course. Their smallness was the point: boned, stuffed with truffled forcemeat and rolled, each one became a single elegant mouthful with a sauce made from its own bones. The "Portuguese style" label here refers to the tomato in the sauce rather than to any Portuguese source, a common nineteenth-century menu convention. Recipes of this kind receded from American cookbooks as market gunning for wild songbirds, shorebirds and waterfowl was progressively curtailed — a decline generally traced to the Lacey Act and state game laws well before the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 — and the pages that survive are chiefly a record of how much of the wild the Gilded Age dining room expected to be served.